BIOGRAPHY OF LORD ELGIN
*This entire piece is taken from the book LOOT! THE HERITAGE OF PLUNDER by Russell Chamberlin*
In 1795 Elgin, a career diplomat then aged 29, decided to marry, and promised his wealthy young bride a handsome new mansion as a wedding present. He engaged [Thomas] Harrison to build Broom Hall and the architect, who had studied in Rome, persuaded his client that the 'classical' style was the only fitting one for a gentleman's residence.
Elgin agreed. Four years later he was offered the plum posting of ambassador to Constantinople at the court of the Sublime Porte, as the sultanate was known. Harrison was overjoyed. This was an unrivalled opportunity, he told Elgin, to 'transport Greece to Scotland'. What Harrison meant, and what Elgin understood him to mean, was simply that Elgin's influential position with the sultanate would allow him to make detailed drawings of ancient Greek architecture and sculpture. Fashionable society in Britain, influenced by such bodies as the Society of Dilettanti, was turning to Greek culture, so long overshadowed by Roman. If Lord Elgin would but supply his architect with copious and faithful copies of Greek art and architecture, then Harrison would build for him a perfect Classical Greek building. Elgin would be the envy of fashionable society. Again Elgin agreed.
He left England in the summer of 1799 with his bride and his personal secretary, an energetic young man called William Richard Hamilton. In Naples, he and Hamilton engaged a Neapolitan painter, Giovanni Lusieri. Elgin and his wife then went on to Constantinople, leaving Hamilton and Lusieri to assemble a team of craftsmen who, according to a detailed brief, were to go to Athens and 'carefully and minutely measure every ancient monument', making plaster casts of the more interesting. Nothing at all was said about removing any of the sculptures.
Hamilton and his team arrived in Athens to find that its greatest glory, the Acropolis, was a squalid mess. A little over a century before, on 26 September 1687, Venetian gunners had lobbed a mortar shell on the Parthenon, then being used as an ammunition store by the Turks. The resultant explosion had totally destroyed the building, but the Turks continued to use the Acropolis as a fortress. Houses and hovels appeared to fill in the gaps between some of the world's noblest buildings-- the depressing new structures composed either of material cannibalized from the ruins or, far worse, whitewashed from their remains. Marble, when burnt, yields lime-- a fact which has done far more to destroy the classic cities of antiquity than any amount of activity by barbarians. The English party had specific experience of this. On being asked what had happened to a number of statues that were obviously missing,
The Turkish owner pointed with a sardonic smile to the lime in the wall which had been made from the sculpture that once stood there...It was impossible to ignore the fact that the ruin of the noblest works of art in the world was progressing with giant steps.
Such is the balanced opinion of Adolf Michaelis, the German archaeologist whose account of the Elgin controversy does not err in favour of Elgin.
The English party were operating under very considerable difficulties. The Disdar, or governor of the fortress, at first refused to allow them access, partly from a sense of religious affront--the Moslem Turks viewed the Christian desire to obtain pagan images with a mixture of outrage and bewilderment--but mostly, it would seem, from cupidity. Hamilton eventually arranged for his team's access to the Acropolis on payment of a swingeing £5 a day to the Disdar, but even then found that they were obliged to work under humiliating restrictions. The Disdar forbade them, for example, to erect scaffolding to copy the higher sculptures, for this would enable the infidels to peer down into the domestic courtyards of good Moslems. After a year's work the team had drawn, and made copies of, only the lesser works that could be tackled at ground level.
It was at this dispiriting stage that they had a visitor of an unusual kind.
Dr Philip Hunt, Chaplain to the British Embassy at Constantinople, was the kind of clergyman which the Anglican Church frequently produces to the benefit of scholarship if not of religion. He shared to the full the prevailing British passion for antiquities, but where his compatriots still tended to satisfy themselves with elegant drawings and descriptions, Dr Hunt wanted the real thing. And he thought on the grand scale. At one stage he even proposed to move the Palace of Mycenae to Britain. Defeated by its size, he turned his speculative gaze upon the Erechtheum: it would fit nicely upon a British man-of-war, he latter assured a slightly dazed Lord Elgin.
Hunt arrived in Athens in early 1801 to watch incredulously as Elgin's agents went about their uninspiring task. Unerringly, he divined the source of their problems-- the local Disdar. Go over his head, he urged: approach Constantinople. In a lively letter to Elgin, he urged him to use his influence as an ambassador to obtain a firman that would free his agents in Athens from pettifogging local restrictions. And it was not sufficient simply to get permission to erect scaffolding and make plaster copies. Elgin should also request 'the liberty to take away any sculptures which do not interfere with the works or walls of the citadel'.
Hunt's letter arrived in Constantinople at an ideal moment. Nelson had just fought and won the Battle of the Nile, British influence was in the ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Britain's ambassador, the seventh Earl of Elgin, was showered with honours. It seemed a little matter to accede to his slightly eccentric request to take away some of the battered stones from the Turkish fortress on the Athenian Acropolis. Elgin received his firman.
The original Turkish firman has long since been lost, the copy transmitted to posterity being in Italian. The crucial clause gave Elgin permission to take away 'qualche pezzi di pietra con iscrizione e figure'. The whole controversy of the Elgin Marbles turns on that word 'qualche'. Usually, it is translated as 'some' and the translation should therefore read 'some pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures'. But it can also be translated as 'any'. Whether or not the original firman gave Elgin this sweeping permission, his agents so interpreted it, immediately beginning with the dismantling of the Parthenon frieze.
The size of the operation can be gauged from the fact that it occupied more than 300 workmen for over a year. Edward Dodwell, an English visitor to Athens at the time, was appalled by what he saw. 'Everything relative to this catastrophe was conducted with an eager spirit of insensate outrage, and an ardour of insensate rapacity, in opposition not only to every feeling of taste but to every sentiment of justice and humanity.' In defence of Lord Elgin it should perhaps be remarked that he was not present during the operation, apart from one brief visit in the spring of 1802. But far from deploring his agents' action he urged them to greater speed, anxious to get the marbles away from Greece before the tide turned in favour of the French. By 1803 some hundreds of pieces of sculptured marble, including a column from the Erechtheum, seventeen figures from the Parthenon pediments and fifteen metopes, were boxed in 200 chests waiting to be shipped to Scotland to adorn Broom Hall. Elgin, as a high-ranking diplomat, obtained permission to ship the treasures by HM warships. It would cost him nothing, but he had already paid out £ 28,000 for the work of dismantling and boxing the marbles.
His treasures safely packed, he set off home. Unwisely, he took advantage of the fact that there was a brief peace between Napoleon's France and England and returned home overland. While he was en route, war broke out again, he was taken prisoner and held as hostage until 1806. Released on parole, he at last reached England to find that his comfortable world was collapsing around his ears. His wife left him for another man, his diplomatic career was in ruins, he lost his seat in the House of Lords-- and his marbles, his precious Grecian antiquities, were the subject of a vicious controversy.
The attack on Elgin was led by a certain Richard Payne Knight. It is difficult now to understand the reason for the sheer venom, the personal hatred which Payne Knight displayed towards a man who had done him no harm, either professional or personal. In his brilliant book on the collecting mania, The Taste of Angels, Francis Henry Taylor summed up Payne Knight as one who 'bore all the complexities and difficulties inherent in the true archaeologist-- jealousy, infallibility coupled with a sense of persecution and a madness for his own subject...the very essence of the archaeological character and temper'. Knight was a leading member of the Society of Dilettanti, elegant young men who possessed both taste and money all wrapped up in an arrogant self-confidence. Knight was their self-appointed arbiter of taste, their touchstone of all that was fashionable in the world of art. It may well be that Knight, as Francis Taylor suggests, was the very model of the intransigent academic, 'for not even a statesman at a peace conference is more unable to repudiate a previously held opinion than the academic potentate who passes as authority in his particular field'. But it may also be that he was simply loyal--over-loyal, perhaps--to his friends in the Dilettanti and could not bear to think that their pretty antiquities were about to be shadowed by those collected, at one swoop, by a Scottish laird-- antiquities believed by many to be from the hands of Phidias himself. Whatever the cause, Knight adopted the manners of a gutter-snipe to attack the wretched Elgin on his belated return to England. At a dinner party where a careless--or malicious--host had brought the two together, he shouted across the crowded room, 'You have lost your labour, my lord. Your marbles are over-rated. They are not Greek: they are Roman of the time of Hadrian.'
The majority of the cases containing the marbles had arrived in England by 1805, the year before Elgin was released. War had broken out between England and Turkey, the French had re-established themselves in Athens, and, smarting over the affair of the Rosetta Stone, had tried to turn the tables by seizing eighty of the chests. English supremacy at sea prevented them from getting their booty away and, in due course, the chests turned up in England. Twelve more chests sank with their freighter off the island of Cerigo, but were raised, two years later, at a cost to Elgin of £ 5,000. Altogether, it was not before 1812 that all the marbles were assembled in England.
Elgin had long since abandoned the idea of taking them to Scotland. Already he was turning over in his mind the possibility of selling them to the government and so recouping his increasingly heavy financial investment in them. Despite the jibes of Payne Knight and his friends the tide of opinion was gradually turning in his favour. Had not the French government actually offered him his freedom if he would but pass the marbles over to France? And had not Ludwig of Bavaria, that prince among collectors, made a special journey to London to try and buy them?
Far more important was the opinion of the artists who came to inspect the marbles stored in a large shed which Elgin had had built on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly to act as gallery. Undoubtedly the most influential artist to see the marbles was Canova. Posterity owes him a particular debt. When, on his ill-fated journey through Europe, Elgin had visited Canova in Rome, he had asked him to 'restore' the sculptures. The Italian resolutely refused. 'They were the work of the ablest artist the world has even seen,' he declared. 'It would be sacrilege for me, or any man, to touch them with a chisel.' After Canova had seen the sculptures in London, Elgin obtained from this impeccable source what amounted to a written certificate of merit:
Oh, that I had but to begin again, to unlearn all that I had learned. I now at last see what ought to form the real school of sculpture. I am persuaded that all artists and amateurs must gratefully acknowledge their high obligation to Your Lordhip for having brought these memorable and stupendous sculptures into our neighborhood.
And if Elgin's fellow Britons found such Italianate sentiments somewhat sugary and flowery, there was the scarcely less enthusiastic reaction of such a solidly English painter as Benjamin Robert Haydon. In his memoirs Haydon describes how he was so bowled over by the sculptures that he rushed out to find his friend, the painter Henry Fuseli, and insisted on him immediately accompanying him to the shed where the sculptures were stored. 'At last we came to Park Lane. Never shall I forget his uncompromising enthusiasm. He strode about saying, "De Greeks were godes! de Greeks were godes!"' And in a letter to Elgin, he finished, 'You have immortalized yourself, my lord, by bringing them.'
Elgin had ineed immortalized himself-- but not in the way he expected or would have relished. The attacks by such as Payne Knight and his cronies can be put down to spiteful envy. The attacks from such as Byron cannot be so dismissed. Although wealthy English dilettantes had been picking up Greek marbles for at least a century, there was, from the very beginning, a general feeling that Elgin had gone too far, that the rape of the most beautiful building in the world--even one so heavily damaged as the Parthenon--just could not be countenanced. Such sentiments were in the beginning confined to those who visited Athens and actually saw the ugly gaps, like gaping wounds freshly made in the marble's warm ivory. A British traveller lamented:
It is painful to reflect that these trophies of human genius, which had resisted the silent decay of time during a period of more than twenty-two centuries, which had escaped the destructive fury of the iconoclasts, the considerable rapacity of the Venetians and the barbarous violence of the Mohammadans, should at last have been doomed to experience the devastating outrage which will never cease to be deplored.
Byron, with a poet's skill, turned that sense of indignation into a literally lapidary phrase, carving into the rock of the Acropolis: 'Quod non fecerunt Gothi, fecerunt Scoti' (What the Goths spared, the Scots destroyed). He followed up that opening shot with a fierce salvo of satire, directed not only against Elgin but also his supporters, embodying it not only in such pieces of temporary polemic as 'The Curse of Minerva' but also in the immortal verse of 'Childe Harold', hurling yet more wounding phrases at 'the modern Pict':
Cold as the crags upon his native coast
His mind as barren and his heart as hard.
By now, Elgin had had enough. The wife, for whom he had planned to bring Greece to Scotland, had abandoned him; the marbles which should have earned him fame as a connoisseur were being used to condemn him as a philistine. He was in need of money. In 1816, therefore, he offered the marbles to the British Government for the sum of £74,240.
On Elgin's calculation, it was by no means an outrageous price. The total cost of dismantling, packaging, and, later, salvaging at sea, ran to some £33,000. Giovanni Lusieri's salary came to £12,000-- a sum Elgin must have bitterly regretted paying, for it was Lusieri, for some devious reason, who had taken Byron round the Acropolis pointing out the damage that had been wrought. The expense of building the gallery in Park Lane, together with all the incidentals of transporting and guarding the marbles, took care of another £6,000. Elgin claimed, reasonably enough, that if he had invested the whole sum it would have earned him £23,240. He added this to the initial outlay and came up with that grand total of £74,240.
The British Government offered him £35,000.
Meanness is expected of governments. But the British Government did have a certain justification in offering Elgin less than half what he had spent. The marbles had not only been transported by warship--that is, at the public expense--but, it was claimed, Elgin acquired them in his capacity of a public servant, as Ambassador.
There is little doubt that it had indeed been Elgin's position which had influenced the Sublime Porte to give him those wide-ranging powers in Athens. But there is also little doubt that Elgin was very considerably out of pocket over the affair. Recourse was had to the universal British panacea-- a committee. In June 1816 a Parliamentary Committee was convened to consider 'Whether it be expedient that the collection mentioned in the Earl of Elgin's petition should be purchased on behalf of the public and, if so, what price it may be reasonable to allow for same.'
It is not often that the ethics of art acquisition are solemnly debated by Parliament. The Committee not only took evidence from a string of leading artists that the marbles were 'in the very first class of ancient art' but also heard from others-- including Elgin's old secretary William Hamilton and the ebullient Dr Hunt--that the Acropolis was in very bad condition and that it was an act of virtue to acquire and preserve such treasures of the past. After sitting for eight days, the Committee recommended that the marbles should indeed be purchased for the nation-- at a price of £35,000. In vain, Elgin protested that such a sum would not cover even his original outlay, much less the interest he had lost upon it. Take it or leave it, was the attitude of the Committee behind their courteous phrases. Elgin took it, bitterly, and stepped out of history, leaving it to the marbles to carry his name down to posterity and obloquy.
It isinevitable that the Elgin Marbles should have become the classic case of elginisme. The bitter controversy received an even sharper edge when, in 1832, the Greeks shook off the Turkish yoke and, almost as their first national act, began restoring the Acropolis. What had been a casual--perhaps even praiseworthy--act, in connection with an unregarded building, became an unforgiveable act of vandalism when that building became a symbol of a gallant little nation's fight for freedom. Small wonder that the searchlight of public opinion should have been, and should continue to be, trained upon this cause celebre.