Elgin+Marbles

=__The Elgin Marbles__=

By Saibh McCaffrey
The Elgin Marbles is the name of the collection of the Classical Greek marble sculptures, inscriptures and architectural features that were all originally part of the Parthenon and the other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. A British nobleman, named Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, had heard of the temples situated on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Thomas Bruce was a collector of antiquities, he gathered drawings and casts of Ancient Greek art, from places such as Athens.

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin

He assembled a team of artists and craftsmen, and in 1800 was granted free access to the Acropolis in Athens, with permission to sketch the temples, take casts of the sculptures, carry out archeological digs and take away any inscriptions or reliefs that were in the rubble on the site ground, but not to remove anything from the temples themselves. The removal of the metopes, frieze and the pediment sculptures was not part of the original plan for the excavation, but when he saw the environment affecting the structure of the Acropolis, such as smog and air pollution, Elgin persuaded the governor of Athens to view the terms of their contact more broadly. This allowed Elgin to remove many of the marbles that were still attached to the Parthenon. From 1801 to 1812 Elgin' craftsmen removed nearly half of the sculptures on the Parthenon, as well as sculptures from the surrounding temples. Elgin spent around £70,000 on this operation, all from his own pocket, and he never fully recovered from the debts he found himself in. When Elgin returned to Britain with the marbles he sold them to the British government for £35,000. He declined higher offers from other potential buyers, including Napoleon, as he had always intended that they be preserved and displayed in the British Museum. The Elgin marbles include 247 ft of the original 524 ft of the frienze, 15 of the 92 metopes and 17 figures from the east and west pediments, all which represent more than half of what now remains of the surviving sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. The Elgin Marbles also include parts taken from the other temples on the Acropolis, a caryatid from the Erechtheum, slabs from the frieze of the Temple of Athene Nike and a number of marble fragments from each of the temples.

__The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum__