Historical manipulation is a-foot

First published in Medium on 17 January 2022.

When somebody does something wrong, they should be given the opportunity to make amends. This is what common sense asks for and sounds like the decent thing to do unless the supposed “amends” are going to produce an even greater wrong. One such case is the “restitution” with much fanfare of the Fagan fragment of the Parthenon Frieze to the Acropolis Museum in Athens by the Sicilian government earlier this month.

Let’s proceed with order and start with the fragment itself. What we are concerned with is a relatively small piece of Pentelic marble (ca. 35x31x10 cm) which was originally part of Slab VI of the famous ionic frieze sculpted by Pheidias in the 5th century BC to decorate the top of the external walls of the naos of the Parthenon in Athens. Because of the particularly high standard of the sculptures, the renown of the master, the prominent position of the artwork in the very heart of the Athenian Acropolis, this little piece of marble is a representative of one of the most celebrated works of art ever made by man. After its installation, the frieze remained untouched for two millennia until on 26 September 1687 a grenade launched by one of the ships of Venetian admiral Francesco Morosini hit the great temple that had in the meantime been converted by the Ottoman Turks into a gunpowder warehouse. The explosion was one of those events we can only imagine thanks to countless action and war movies, and the result was that the famed temple was gutted from the inside, left with almost only the front and rear colonnades standing and much of the sculptural decoration scattered all over the Acropolis and its immediate surroundings.

Fast forward two hundred years and the sacred rock of the Athenians is swarming with wealthy gentlemen from western-European countries who are keen to see with their own eyes the glory of Classical Antiquity. And with tourism, in its embryonal form, we also witness a boost to antiquarianism and collecting. Everybody wants to prove they have been there and to share the sense of ecstatic marvel they felt in those places with those at home who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the difficult journey to the Mediterranean. Since the days of Le Roy and Stuart & Revett, with their richly illustrated works about the antiquities of Athens, it’s all a floruit of watercolours, etchings, engravings, plaster casts and of course the more or less innocent systematic pillage of actual antiquities brought home with or without lawful authorisation.

Not everyone of course has the means and the influence of Lord Elgin (who was not only an earl but also the ambassador of the superpower of the day to the court of Constantinople) and to come to our fragment, it seems to have made its way West in a much less dramatic way. There is no reason to doubt that Robert Fagan (1761–1816), a British artist and antiquarian who sometime after his own Grand Tour ended up being appointed to the British Consulate in Palermo in 1809, acquired his own piece of ancient Athens in less than legitimate a manner. And we, in our role of modern-day inquisitors, should not allow ourselves to think otherwise unless we can come up with some solid evidence. Circumstantial evidence makes it as far as the television programs, but very rarely is allowed into the history books of some repute. The Consul General ended up riddled with debts, which he paid in part by selling his collection. Part of it, including the Parthenon fragment, ended up being bought by the University of Palermo, and finally acquired by what was then called the Museo Nazionale (now Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas). All in all, a fairly straightforward career for a museum exhibit. It is also quite interesting to note that the marble doesn’t show the signs of the crowbar marks that are instead present of the Elgin Marbles, suggesting that the fragment may have been lying on the ground since the time of the explosion in 1687 before being collected and hen sold.

Yet, earlier this month we heard that the Fagan fragment of the Parthenon Frieze is being “returned” to Greece and that this gesture of the Sicilian government “sets a precedent” for the repatriation of the rest of the frieze, especially from London. Sicily is celebrated by the Greek premier Mitsotakis as a trailblazer, and as a stepping stone on a process that would ideally reunite the whole of the figurative cycle under the same roof, that of the new high-tech Museum of the Acropolis in Athens. Everywhere we read about this being the first falling stone of the crumbling edifice of museum colonialism, with more or less the same people milling the same water about how what Lord Elgin did was illegal, that if he had the permit this was a forgery, that if it was indeed authentic he exceeded the limits of his licence, that the authority itself was illegitimate and could not grant the permit in the first place. Regardless of the status of the Elgin Marbles, this is now what we are dealing with here. There is no controversy about how Fagan acquired the fragment, nor about the legal standing of the Museum’s ownership of it.

It is a war about words. Look at what has been said by Professor Nikolaos Stampolidis, director of the Acropolis Museum: “I would never sign any contract with the term ‘loan’. A loan means that I understand that the possession of the other is legal, and this is not the case”. So the two museums agree to call it a deposit, they establish for it to be renewable, and then try to make a case for it to be a deposit sine die, without an end date. While all this happens in the museums, the newsstands are full of newspapers heralding the “return”, the “restitution”, and asking for more. The discussion then enlarges, putting on the same level not only Elgin and Fagan (which are already two very different cases), but also the Benin Bronzes, the Axum stela, the Pergamon frieze, and so many other cultural objects that seem to talk about the same thing and yet really don’t. The devil is in the detail here: when, how, by whom, on whose authority, are all details that distinguish a lawful sale from pillage.

But there is another aspect of the question that I, as a scholar of classical antiquity who was living in Athens when the new Acropolis Museum was erected and who has published on problems of Athenian templar sculptural decorations, find particularly upsetting. The entire argument sits upon the idea of a monument “belonging” somewhere. The Greeks say their ancestors made those sculptures, they placed them on the Acropolis and they are part of their cultural identity, so they must “return home”. Let’s put aside for a moment the ridicule idea that there may be any real continuity between the Greeks of today and those of 2,500 years ago. People, historically, move things around quite a bit; should we say that those slabs should be displayed on Mount Penteli because this is where the marble came originally from? Who decides which moment of the long history of an artefact should be privileged in order to establish its ideal location? Moreover, do any of those people really have the courage to say that those marbles don’t belong also to our cultural identity? Think about what European Neoclassicism would have been, had those fragments of statues, friezes, and vases not made their way into the museums of Europe. Our entire ideas about beauty would have been different. These things really are part of what we are, all of us, not just the (modern) Greeks and the British Museum has a point when it says they are custodians of a global heritage.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that every corner of the world has a right to keep artefacts of the Greek past whatever the circumstances of their acquisition, just in the name of a shared significance. There are laws regulating the exportation of cultural objects, and rightly so. But these are part of how we perceive these matters today, and apply to transfers that are happening today, both legally and illegally. But those that are advocating the “repatriation” of all cultural artefacts to their countries of origin are depicting a cultural scene of depressing squalor. Picture in your mind for a moment a world with British museums full just of British artefacts and Greek museums filled only with Greek items. How useful would these museums be as places where people learn about the other? How efficient would these museums be as powerhouses of academic research? I can only imagine such a scenario in the worst nationalistic dictatorships.

To sum it up, we have a group of people who have decided they are the direct descendants of the Athenians of the Classical period, obsessed with rebuilding a temple that they think represents well their ideology at the expense of all the other historical facts that don’t fit the narrative and all the rules regarding property rights and international relationships. These are the same people, just to make it clear, who are furiously integrating the missing pieces on all major monuments of a distant past in ruins to improve their touristic potential and who wanted to forbid the state of Macedonia from calling itself that way because “Macedonia is Greece”. Agreed, we may well think that the gentlemen of the Grand Tour were wrong (as judged through our modern lens) in taking culturally significant objects away from their place of origin, and yet the new Greek way to make amends doesn’t sound that right to me either.

All things considered, I am convinced that other than talking about a 2,500-year-old marble foot being moved from one museum to another, this is just a bad case of collective foot in the mouth.