Exact replicas of the Parthenon marbles

June 16, 2024 4:22 PM

This team went guerilla-style into the British Museum to create exact replicas of the Parthenon marbles. This archaeologist and his team had a simple plan — take 3D scans of the Parthenon marbles and recreate them for the British Museum so the originals could be returned to Greece. When the museum said no, they went in anyway, guerilla-style.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (23 comments total)

Featured on an Australian TV show titled “Stuff the British Stole.”
posted by adamrice at 4:36 PM on June 16 [12 favorites]

They should absolutely return the originals and put copies on display. The fact they're not getting proper scans and having to rely on shitty photogrammetry is a farce. The freaking V&A gets it; has, in fact, been getting it since the 19th century. The casts in the V&A are now often in better condition than the originals. Scan the world.
posted by phooky at 4:46 PM on June 16 [13 favorites]

3d scans should be part of a museum's conservation program and digital presence. Budget permitting of course. But the Parthenon frieze is some of the most famous art in the world, I imagine the remnants of the British empire can afford to scan them.

See also the unauthorized 3d model of the Nefertiti bust that a pair of artists released in 2016 as a stunt. The Berlin Neues Museum is famously restrictive of access to it, including getting quite aggressive when anyone tries to even take a cell phone snapshot of it. They succeeded in forcing the issue and the museum finally released its own scan a few years later.
posted by Nelson at 4:52 PM on June 16 [12 favorites]

I was thinking about the Nefertiti scans when I saw this too, which is also why I'm skeptical of the "guerilla scan" claims. The British Museum has certainly made high quality scans several times at this point.

I've had a print of Cosmo's scan of the head of a horse of Selene on my bookshelf for a few years. I originally printed it in green PLA but recently spray painted it bright yellow. It's neat!
posted by phooky at 5:01 PM on June 16 [3 favorites]

Featured on an Australian TV show titled “Stuff the British Stole.”

Was episode 1 titled "Australia?"
posted by pwnguin at 5:18 PM on June 16 [30 favorites]

They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is...
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:22 PM on June 16 [13 favorites]

Inspired by Steven Wright.
posted by whuppy at 5:34 PM on June 16

>I was thinking about the Nefertiti scans when I saw this too, which is also why I'm skeptical of the "guerilla scan" claims.

According to the article, no guerrilla style maneuvering was required at all, scanning is explicitly allowed. "We read the regulations for the museum and it says specifically [that], 'Visitors may use 3D scanning equipment in the museum and they may use the product of those 3D scans for any non-commercial purpose,'"
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 6:12 PM on June 16 [5 favorites]

for anyone visiting London who wishes to avoid the British Museum: the Athenaeum Club has an exact replica of the Parthenon Marbles on the building exterior [wiki]
posted by HearHere at 6:40 PM on June 16

i seem to recall that back in the 20^th century england claimed that the marbles should remain in their hands instead of being returned to greece because they are so important that they cannot be kept in a geopolitically unstable nation. this seems like a sound argument in favor of them being removed immediately from england and shipped to a greece, an e.u. member country with a comparatively stable political system.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:19 PM on June 16 [32 favorites]

Featured on an Australian TV show titled “Stuff the British Stole.”
Was episode 1 titled "Australia?"
Australia would be a fair way down the list if you look chronologically ...

There's a little bit of sensationalist writing in the article around the whole 'guerilla style' scanning for sure. No doubt the formal request was along the lines of seeking approval to scan the marbles for the purpose of duplicating them and returning the originals, which the museum was never going to agree to. Makes for a better story, I guess.
posted by dg at 7:49 PM on June 16 [2 favorites]

I thought I understood the injustice of Britain looting ancient artifacts and refusing to return them, but seeing replicas of Greek carvings here in Turkey along with a little plaque stating "we hope the British Museum will return it" really brought it home in a visceral way.
posted by Zumbador at 10:22 PM on June 16 [11 favorites]

The Parthenon has been a temple to Athena, a Christian church and a mosque and suffered great damage with each turn of history...

The Art Newspaper -- A short history of the Parthenon Marbles
      11/30/2002:

...Advocates of the “restitution” of the Elgin Marbles do their best to ignore, belittle or dismiss the fact that the sculptures removed by Lord Elgin’s agents from the Parthenon were spared substantial further damage. Instead, the more intemperate of them suggest that Elgin’s actions represent perhaps the worst assault ever perpetrated upon the building.

The history of the degradation and destruction of the architectural sculpture on the Parthenon spans 1,600 years, from the fifth century to the closing decades of the 20th century. In what follows I will seek to place Elgin’s actions in the context of that history before turning to what I regard the central issue in the “Marbles” debate.

The first and greatest single assault on the sculpture that ornamented the Parthenon occurred around 500 when the temple was converted into a Christian church.

It was at that time that the statues in the east pediment depicting the birth of Athena—the most important decorative element of the main façade of the temple—were removed and destroyed.

Approximately 65% of the east pediment sculptures were lost at that time.

All that remained in situ of that massive composition were seven of the outermost framing figures.

At the same time the metopes of the east, north and west sides of the building were systematically defaced, six frieze blocks, three on the north and three on the south side, were removed in the process of opening windows into the church, and the central block of the east frieze was removed.

The late Robert Browning, a staunch advocate of “restitution”, glossed over this assault on the Parthenon in an astonishing manner. He wrote of the transformation of the Parthenon into a church: “The occasional, apparently deliberate, defacement of sculptural figures was probably the work of over-zealous Christians at this time but there was no systematic defacement.”

It is incorrect to suggest that the destruction was the work of some “over-zealous” Christian minority. It was part of a wholesale, church/State-sponsored assault on pagan sculpture throughout the late Roman empire. The battered remnants of classical architectural sculpture and the thousands of empty statue bases that litter classical sites attest to the thoroughness and fury of this Christian onslaught on pagan art. Furthermore, the systematic manner in which the Parthenon was assaulted can hardly be described as “occasional, apparently deliberate defacement”. A great deal of organisation and effort went into achieving those results. This militant, iconoclastic Christian strand in the patrimony of modern Greeks deserves wider acknowledgement.

A large series of drawings attributed to Jacques Carrey provides a reliable indication of what sculptures survived the modifications to render the Parthenon fit for Christian worship and still remained on the building in 1674, the year in which he visited Athens as a member of Louis XIV’s embassy to Constantinople.

The greatest catastrophe to befall the fabric of the Parthenon occurred in 1687 in the course of the Venetian bombardment of the Turkish garrison holding the Acropolis. A direct hit ignited the munitions the Turks had stored in the building. The resultant explosion demolished most of the north and south sides of the building. Fourteen well-preserved metopes that adorned the central portion of the south side and a comparable number of the long-defaced metopes on the north side were destroyed and the central frieze blocks on both the north and south sides of the building were shattered. The sculptural decorations surviving on the east and west fronts were not damaged by the explosion but the west pediment suffered when an officer serving under Francesco Morosini, the victorious Venetian commander, sought to remove Athena’s horses in order to transport them to Venice. This attempt ended in disaster: the equipment used to lift the horses failed; they were dropped and shattered.

In the 18th century, the sculptures that survived the Venetians suffered enormous damage and destruction through the piecemeal actions of generations of indifferent locals and souvenir-seeking visitors from Western Europe...

I could go on even more at length but it only gets more depressing. Like for instance, the giant chryselephantine statue of Athena was dismantled and rebuilt in a Byzantine palace where it was destroyed when the place later burned down...

The Parthenon Sculptures -- The Pediments
Photographs including The Carrey Drawings of the Parthenon Sculptures of 1674 made 13 years before the Venetian bombardment that did the most damage to the Parthenon on 26 September 1687.

Previously

Greek Architecture and Linkeriffica of Antiquity

Athena Parthenos, Olympian Zeus, and Cult Statues Made by Classical Greek Sculptor Phidias

Centauromachies, Amazonomachies, Gigantomachies and Gorgo

Most of which are now forests of dead links but the name to remember is

Benoît-Édouard Loviot

0f all the French Beaux Arts architects who painted renderings of Greek temples in their day, Loviot is my favorite for all the obvious reasons.

I strongly recommend you check out Paris-Rome-Athens: Travels in Greece by French Architects in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries from your library or even buy a copy from Amazon. It is just packed with the most beautiful renderings of Greek and Roman temples. I treasure the paperback copy I bought way way back when.

posted by y2karl at 12:49 AM on June 17 [9 favorites]

YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A PARTHENON MARBLE
posted by AlSweigart at 4:36 AM on June 17 [14 favorites]

Do the Benin bronzes next.

Of course there is a law that prevents returning this stuff. Which is always cited when the topic comes up. Oddly enough, there has never been any attempt to get the law repealed, even after thousands of items were stolen from the British Museum.

The only pieces I am at all sympathetic to keeping are the Assyrian ones and that only temporarily until things are safer in Iraq. Even then, Evans and replicas would be a good idea, given that people are touching the three millenia old stone every day.
posted by Hactar at 7:46 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]

My dentist uses a 3D scanner when preparing for a new crown. As he rubs the sensor stick around inside the mouth it makes either a pleasant piano arpeggio or a discordant piano that sounds like a toddler mashing all the keys at once.

This is the image in my head when they talk about their efforts to surreptitiously scan the marbles.

Which should be returned posthaste.
posted by funkaspuck at 8:33 AM on June 17 [1 favorite]

There are some 3D scans of Benin Bronzes and other Benin objects.

There's a broad agreement the Benin bronzes should be returned to Nigeria but a long, slow process of establishing what happens to them when they are back in Nigeria. Currently they are scattered across a bunch of Western institutions (the British sold them as plunder.) Many institutions started returning them to Nigeria a few years ago including the Smithsonian, the New York Metropolitan, and the German government. The British Museum has a detailed page on their position that's at least forthright, using words like "looted" and "repatriated" and "friendly and courteous meeting", and generally seems amenable to returning them.

A few years ago it looked like a lot of major collections were ready to return them with a plan for a Nigerian government-run museum and lots of financial and curatorial support from other institutions. That got complicated last year though. The outgoing Nigerian president announced a new policy that the objects were the private property of Ewuare II, the ceremonial king of Benin. And so the Western institutions are putting it on hold for fear they'd end up being inaccessible to the public.

Here's the most recent update I could find on the current politics. It concludes:

It appears unfair that Nigeria should have to justify why it is ready to be the home for objects that rightfully, and legally, belong within its borders. But the chances of any more bronzes being returned appear to be slim as long as there are strong political disagreements between the Benin royal family, the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, and Nigeria’s federal institutions.

Meanwhile, back in Athens, no one doubts the Parthenon frieze would be well cared for by the Greek government. They've got a whole museum built and ready to receive them.
posted by Nelson at 9:33 AM on June 17 [4 favorites]

Well, it's not like Greece and Great Britain hadn't been walking on eggshells and talking about it lately:

After 220 Years, the Fate of the Parthenon Marbles Rests in Secret Talks

One wonders what gives now.
posted by y2karl at 10:20 AM on June 17

they may use the product of those 3D scans for any non-commercial purpose,

Fascinating. So are the Parthenon Marbles still under copyright?
posted by srboisvert at 2:40 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]

...The history of the degradation and destruction of the architectural sculpture on the Parthenon spans 1,600 years...

All no doubt true, yet we still generally don't thank thieves, even if the place they thieved from is later damaged.
posted by deadwax at 3:27 PM on June 17 [4 favorites]

Later damage? The Patthenon was being damaged before and during when and while the Parthenon marbles were taken. By all local parties involved. Parts of it were being carted off right and left by Greeks and Turks alike who had neither love nor respect for pagan statues as way over amply described in the blockquote of my comment above. Personally I think the Marbles should and eventually will be returned and will be better off for it but, all the same, they are in far better shape from sitting in the British Museum throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries rather than out in 19th and 20th century Athenian air pollution and the acid rain it created duri g the same time. History is complicated. The situation is farther towards fifty shades of gray than in purely black and white.
posted by y2karl at 8:50 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]

The situation is farther towards fifty shades of gray than in purely black and white.

In the sense that it is romanticized abuse?
posted by The Manwich Horror at 4:06 AM on June 19

In the sense that it is romanticized abuse?

Perhaps

In one case, Professor Trypanis said, the face of a horseman on the west wall of the Parthenon has been virtually obliterated in 10 years. As a result plans are being drafted to put many of the remaining sculptures in the museum and replace them with plaster casts.

There is a certain irony in this, since Greece has Iong tried to recover the Elgin Marbles, which were taken from the Acropolis and sold to the British Museum in 1816. Those marbles, Greek experts concede, are far better preserved than the ones Lord Elgin left behind.
Greece Striving to Protect Acropolis From Pollution and Tourists

from the February 18, 1975 New York Times will help make my point more clearly.
posted by y2karl at 11:15 PM on June 19