Emma M. Payne (2021). Casting the Parthenon Sculptures from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781350120358 (original) (raw)

PARTHENON SCULPTURES IN 2021 -A YEAR IN REVIEW

Neos Kosmos, 2021

2021 marked the 200 th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution. During the early stages of the Greek War of Independence there was a siege of the Acropolis by the Greek rebels. One of their generals, Makriyannis, told his troops that they were fighting not only for freedom but also to preserve their heritage. Gesturing towards the Acropolis and the Parthenon Makriyannis declared: "You must not give away these things … you must not let them leave the country, it was for them that we fought"

As Greek as it gets: British attempts to recreate the Parthenon

The arrival of the Elgin Marbles in Britain and several ambitious attempts to reconstruct the Parthenon in London, Cambridge and elsewhere fostered its general reputation as ‘a building from which derived all that is good’. While it is well known that the high esteem held for the Parthenon after the defeat of Bonaparte was predicated by a change in taste and by associating this monument with the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks in 479 bc, another crucial issue has as yet been overlooked: the self-interest of those attempting to recreate the Parthenon. By linking their own present with an alien, even fictitious, past, they wished to associate themselves with an aura of greatness that would suggest their own heroic power. Putting themselves on the same level as Pericles, Pheidias, Iktinos and Kallikrates, they could argue for their own cultural superiority while hoping for kleos aphthiton—fame and glory that outlast death. No other monument from the ancient world could, at the time, have offered a more suitable basis for such approbation. The article focuses on the British reception of the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century. It introduces new evidence as to how and why, after the Napoleonic Wars, the British epitomized the Periclean monument as the pinnacle of human accomplishment. It argues that the monument was reintegrated into the Western art canon by replicating its sculpture through plaster casts and by substituting historic facts for fiction. As the unique quality of the Parthenon's architecture was not known and published prior to 1838 and not introduced to a British audience before 1851, the Parthenon could only have gained its importance and fame because of the physical presence of the Elgin Marbles. Hence, I will make clear that the sculpture was a pivotal element in rendering the Parthenon a canonical monument.

The Parthenon Sculptures and Cultural Justice

2012

From government and philosophy to art drama and culture, the ancient Athenians, as most everyone knows, gave future generations so much. Yet the pinnacle of their artistic achievement, the Parthenon, remains a damaged and incomplete work of art. 2012 marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the last removal of works of art from the Parthenon. That taking was ordered by an English diplomat known to history as Lord Elgin, and it reminds us that cultures create lasting monuments. But not equally. Cultures which remove the artistic achievements of other nations have increasingly been confronted with uncomfortable questions about how these objects were acquired. Nations of origin are increasingly deciding to press claims for repatriation of works taken long ago. They proceed through history mindful of the irresistible genius of their forebears have created and are unwilling to cease their calls for return. The majority of the surviving sculptures from the Parthenon in Greece now are currently on display in the British Museum in London. The Greek government and cultural heritage advocates, have been asking for reunification of these sculptures in the New Acropolis Museum in Athens. Greece has offered a number of concessions, but the British Museum and the British Government have repeatedly refused to seriously discuss reunification. Mounting pressure on the British Museum, and the inescapable fact that the Parthenon was an ancient unified work of art both mean that the Parthenon marbles will either eventually be returned to Greece or subject to an endless repatriation debate. Here I offer a series of principles which the Greeks and the British Museum can take to jointly create a just return. Because the way the British Museum and Greece resolve this argument will have much to say for the future of the management of our collective cultural heritage.

Casting a New Canon: Collecting and Treating Casts of Greek and Roman Sculpture, 1850–1939

The Cambridge Classical Journal, 2019

From the mid-nineteenth century, it became de rigueur for Classics Departments to acquire casts of Greek and Roman sculpture to form reference and experimental collections. Recent scholarship has revived such casts, investigating their role as instruments of teaching and research, and their wavering popularity. This paper further examines the aims of those responsible for collecting casts, and discusses how these objectives influenced their materiality and treatment, as well as showing how the de facto creation of a new canon of casts through their repetition across the collections of different institutions contributed to the decline in their perceived importance.