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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 4
Lesson 3: Ancient Greece- The classical orders
- The Athenian Agora and the experiment in democracy
- Anavysos Kouros
- Peplos Kore from the Acropolis
- Making Greek vases
- Niobid Painter, Niobid Krater
- Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear Bearer)
- Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer)
- Parthenon (Acropolis)
- The Parthenon
- Who owns the Parthenon sculptures?
- Phidias, Parthenon sculptures (pediments, metopes and frieze)
- "Plaque of the Ergastines" fragment from the frieze on the east side of the Parthenon
- Victory (Nike) Adjusting Her Sandal, Temple of Athena Nike (Acropolis)
- Grave Stele of Hegeso
- Winged Victory (Nike) of Samothrace
- Great Altar of Zeus and Athena at Pergamon
- Alexander Mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii
- Apollonius, Seated Boxer
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Who owns the Parthenon sculptures?
Phidias(?), Parthenon sculptures, frieze: 438-432 B.C.E., pediment: c. 438-432 B.C.E. and metopes: c. 447-32 B.C.E., an ARCHES video
Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- Dumb question, why are they all headless or missing limbs? Is it because they are old or have the limbs been lost over time?(34 votes)
- This is not a dumb question. In fact, I've given you an upvote! Heads rest on necks. When one carves a statue, the thin places with heavy stuff on top of them are more fragile, and more likely to break. The same is true of arms. Beyond that, heads and hands make really neat souvenirs for the many armies and soldiers who have been through the region under loose supervision over the centuries.(21 votes)
- If the sculptures were returned to Greece, would the government attempt to reinstall them or would they be housed in a museum? Has this been discussed at all between the Greek and the British governments/ authorities?(7 votes)
- why cant they just rebuild it if they have all pieces? i mean even if they don't have all pieces. can they still rebuild(6 votes)
- If they rebuild it with non-original pieces, they'll inevitably change the statue, even if they make it as accurate as possible. They could rebuild, but it would take away from the value of the art. One of the powerful things about the Parthenon sculptures is their age and that they have remained unchanged (aside from damage).(6 votes)
- If the British Museum stands for universal culture, shouldn't it be renamed?(5 votes)
- What other museums around the world would you rename while you're at it? For example. "Crystal Bridges" in Arkansas has lots of Art, but does not specialize in paintings of Crystal Bridges.(3 votes)
- This may be kind of dumb but,Why do some of the sculptures have missing heads or limbs(4 votes)
- Statues that have been carved from stone, and then are exposed to weather for centuries, get cracked. Necks and arms are "thin places" where cracks happen because they can't bear the weight, so heads and arms fall off first. Then, they make attractive things for people like explorers and soldiers to carry home.(4 votes)
- Why would the Greeks take some art work back to where they live without giving there stuff back where they got it from?(4 votes)
- It was different back then. The Greeks could take stuff and not think anything about it. They didn’t have any laws forcing them to give works of art back to people. Even if they did, the Greeks had really big egos, they probably wouldn’t have given them back anyways.(3 votes)
- Claiming the plundering of cultural heritage was legal at the time is a terrible argument because the damage it creates is not limited to the time when the artworks were stolen, every generation of Greeks that grows up having to travel abroad to experience an important part of their own culture is hurt by the decision of England not only to steal them but not to return them.(4 votes)
- Affirmed. You are 100% correct. But now that the crime has been committed, how can remediation be done? The British museum should return the Parthenon sculptures and a lot of other stuff to competent authorities in Greece and in other nations around the world, and put plaster casts and 3D printed versions of the stuff into the galleries in London, or use that space to house homeless people and refugees. Do you agree?(3 votes)
- Why he didn't have no choice but to sell it to the English government?(3 votes)
- He had spent all of his money removing the sculptures and other materials, and transporting them to the UK. He didn't have the money either to store them in the UK or to display them or anything. He had to sell them. Since he had abused his power as a servant of the government to steal these things, and the Ottomans would not pay him to get them back, it was either sell them to the government or throw them away.(4 votes)
- as soon as weird conspiracy theorists take over the comments section on art history i can trust David Alexander to take them down.(4 votes)
- How long has David Alexander been working at Khan? He seems to answer a lot of questions.(4 votes)
Video transcript
(gentle music) - [Steven] We're in London
at the British Museum, standing in a gallery devoted to the sculpture of the Parthenon. - [Beth] This is a
gallery that was designed to house these sculptures which arrived at the British Museum in
the early 19th century. Now we're looking at some of
the most revered sculpture in all of Western art. - [Steven] These sculptures were seen as the High Classical style
that for hundreds of years we believed we could
only hope to re-achieve. These sculptures and the
building that it came from the Parthenon, are more
than 2,000 years old. But the controversy of
how these sculptures ended up in London is
more than 200 years old. - [Beth] What we're
looking at are sculptures that are divorced from the building that they came from, the Parthenon. - [Steven] But they were integral to it and it's impossible to divorce the meaning of these sculptures from
their original context. - [Beth] Let's spend a minute
looking at one of the panels from the frieze of the Parthenon
and why these sculptures and this classical
moment of ancient Greece have been so revered in Western art. The sculptures on the
frieze depict a procession, mostly of horses and riders. - [Steven] And look at
the naturalism here. The artists have been
examining the anatomy of the nude male, but also of the horse. Look at the way in which
the man's thigh bulges out as it presses against the horse. You can see the concavity of the hip bone. Look at the way that the artist has carefully depicted
the twisting of the body. The legs are moving forward,
but the chest turns to face us. - [Beth] We can see the
ribcage, we can see the muscles in the abdomen, the muscles
in the shoulders and the arms. That love of anatomy that we
know from ancient Greek art. Whereas the horse on the right rears up and has a sense of passion and energy, the human figures have a calm nobility. - [Steven] After the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power. France had been expanding it's territory, but under Napoleon, it begins a campaign to conquer much of Europe. - [Beth] It's against this background that the sculpture in this
room is taken from Athens and makes its way to London. The other important context
here is the interest in ancient Greek and Roman antiquities that just explodes in the 18th century. You have Napoleon not only
conquering territories but bringing scholars with
him to help him identify important works of art,
important monuments, that he brings back to France
to fill the new Musee Napoleon which becomes the Louvre Museum. So you have this competition
among European powers for the great works of
classical antiquity. - [Steven] So the man
responsible for bringing these sculptures from Athens to London, Lord Elgin, was a Scottish nobleman. And he received an extremely
important diplomatic mission. He became ambassador
to the Ottoman Empire. - [Beth] And he became
ambassador at a critical moment when the British had just won
a decisive battle in Egypt so the balance of power
shifted away from France. - [Steven] So for the
Ottomans, the French were out and the British were in. And Elgin was the primary representative of the British Crown, which
gave him tremendous power. Now from the beginning Elgin
imagined that he could help develop the arts of Britain. - [Beth] And what better way
to do that than to furnish the British public with
examples of this great moment in Western sculpture, the
sculptures from the Parthenon. His first idea was to
create copies, to make molds and to have artists draw. His motivation was
certainly personal in terms of decorating his home
in the antique style, but it was also generous,
it was also educational. - [Steven] He asked the
British government for funding to help support this artistic endeavor. They declined, but Elgin went ahead anyway and he hired a team
that he sent to Athens. Now the building had a
long, complex history and was built as a temple
to the goddess Athena, but then it had been turned into a church and eventually it had
been turned into a mosque. But the Ottomans also
stored gunpowder there and when they were
attacked by the Venetians the building exploded. - [Beth] Leaving debris
across the Acropolis. When Elgin's team wanted
to begin their work they encountered some problems from the local Ottoman authorities. And so they asked Elgin
back in Constantinople to secure for them a firman or a permit which would allow them to do
the work on the Acropolis. The very first firman or
permit doesn't survive but the second firman has come
down to us in translation. It describes what Elgin's
men were allowed to do. It says. - [Steven] They were allowed
to draw and they were allowed to cast, they were allowed
to erect scaffolding. - [Beth] And they were
allowed to excavate. But the critical passage of
this firman or this permit reads, "No one should meddle
with their scaffolding or implements nor hinder
them from taking away any pieces of stone with
inscriptions or figures." And it's that last phrase that
reads somewhat ambiguously. What happens is Elgin's
men see an opportunity, through cajoling, through bribery, through using the power of
Elgin's office to extend the interpretation of this
firman enough to allow them to take sculpture from
the Parthenon itself. - [Steven] And the act
of removing the sculpture was necessarily an act of destruction. - [Beth] This is a difficult
and expensive endeavor and Elgin is laying out
his own money to do this. - [Steven] In fact, he's borrowing to be able to afford this project. - [Beth] He took 247 of
the 524 feet of the frieze. He took 15 metopes out of 92 and he took 17 sculptures
from the pediment. Now we're just talking about
sculptures from the Parthenon, there were many other things that he took. - [Steven] By this time
he was in deep debt and he offered to sell the sculptures to the British government. - [Beth] He basically had no choice. Even storing them was
enormously expensive. - [Steven] The British government convened a parliamentary commission to
investigate the circumstances of the acquisition and
to determine the quality of the sculpture and to settle on a price. - [Beth] Ultimately the
government did decide that the sculptures were acquired legally and they paid Elgin 35,000 pounds, less than half of what he
estimated his own costs to be. - [Steven] But from the very
beginning, there was real criticism leveled against Elgin
for removing the sculptures from Greece and for the destruction that that necessarily caused. - [Beth] And soon after the
arrival of the Elgin marbles here in Britain, Greece
finally achieves independence from the Ottoman Empire
and these sculptures and the Parthenon itself and
the buildings on the Acropolis, become a symbol of national
identity for the Greeks. - [Steven] And the Greeks
ask for the marbles back. - [Beth] So where does
that leave us today? The argument that Elgin's
actions were illegal. - [Steven] Although his
critics state that in fact he exceeded his legal authority,
there's also the argument that is persuasive for
many, that Elgin although doing damage to the building
and to many of the sculptures ultimately preserved the sculptures. - [Beth] Before Elgin got
there, the French were taking sculptures from the Parthenon. So you have not only the
French taking things, you have tourists who
are picking things up off the Acropolis or buying
things from local inhabitants. Everyone wanted a piece of the
monuments on the Acropolis. - [Steven] But the counter-argument
there is strong also, Elgin actually destroyed
the temple in part to remove the sculptures. The sculptures themselves suffered and in a number of cases
were exposed to seawater. And the British Museum does
not have an unblemished role in protecting the sculptures either. In the early 20th century, they were responsible for
an overzealous cleaning. - [Beth] There's also another
argument that's often made that if the marbles were sent back, it would have a kind of ripple effect and so many of the objects that
are in encyclopedic museums in the West, like the Louvre, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like the British Museum, would also need to be sent
back to their place of origin. - [Steven] The Greeks have
built a beautiful modern museum designed especially to
house these objects. - [Beth] And we could
finally have the opportunity to see them all together. - [Steven] If they were
returned, we would also see them closer to their original context, we could look out those
magnificent glass windows to the Acropolis itself
to see these objects in that brilliant Mediterranean sunlight. - [Beth] Another critical
argument made for keeping the sculptures here is
that the British Museum is a universal museum. - [Steven] And so here
it's possible to compare ancient Greek art with
ancient Assyrian art, with ancient Egyptian art,
with art from East Asia, with art from Africa. And there is real benefit to that. - [Beth] You could say
that the collections of the British Museum promote tolerance and cross-cultural understanding. That we understand the
objects in the British Museum as being owned by humanity broadly. - [Steven] Except that it just
happens to be in the capital of one of the world's
great former empires. - [Beth] And an empire
that committed violent acts against its colonies. And while the Greeks make the
argument that the sculptures are a central part of Greek
identity, there are those that argue that the Greeks of
ancient Athens are completely different Greeks than the
Greeks of the modern era. - [Steven] But the Parthenon is distinct and it's different in
part because it's not only deeply important to the
Greeks, it has become deeply important to American
culture, to British culture, to French culture, to a
kind of global culture. What the ancient Greeks did
in Athens in the 5th century has had the most profound
impact on modern society that this culture has
been embraced universally. The classical art historian
archeologist Mary Beard puts this just beautifully. - [Beth] She wrote, "The
debate that surrounds "the Elgin Marbles forces
us to face the unanswerable "question of who can, and
should, own the monument. "Can a single monument act as
a symbol both of nationhood "and of world culture?" So how do we reconcile
the universal meaning of these sculptures, the
meaning that we've given them, that these sculptures stand for democracy. - [Steven] And for the
nobility of humankind. - [Beth] How do we
balance that with the fact that it was indeed the
Greeks who made this incredible contribution
to Western civilization? (upbeat piano music)