ELGIN MARBLES. A eeleb•ated collection of ancient sculptures. brought from Greece by Thomas, seventh Earl of Elgin, and acquired from him for the British Alliseinn. on ap pointment as Ambassador to the Porte in 1790, Lord Elgin prepared to have drawings and casts made of the Athenian sculptures. but vexatious hindrances both at Constantinople and on the part of the local authorities prevented any prog ress until, in iqni, lie secured a new finnan. giving him tmlarged powers. and part ividarly for bidding any hindrance to his "taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions or figures." This clause was stretched to cover a wholesale removal not merely of the numerous seulptur•s discovered in excavating. or in the walls and courts of recent buildings. but also of the best specimens still in .s-if After a year of toil, the principal figures from the pediments, 15 met (toes :Ind 5(1 slobs from the frieze of the Par thenon, one of the so-called Caryatids from the •rrelitheum, part of the frieze of the Temple of Athene Nike. and numerous fragments and in scriptions, had been prepared for shipping. The war with France delayed the shipment, and though the first boxes reached England after a short time, it was 1812 before the last con signment arrived. Strange as it now seems, the Elgin core at first received coldly and oven with severely hostile criticism. The Society of Dilettanti. Payne Knight at the bead, decried them as Merely architcetUral pieces, the work of draughtsmen scarcely worthy of the • of artists, and it was not till such recognized au thorities as Visconti and Canova had pointed out their historical and artistic value, that in 1816 a committee of the !louse of Commons Was ap pointed to consider their purchase by the Gov ernment. Lord Elgin had already spent i:51,000, besides the loss of interest, which he estimated at 122:3,240. The hearing proved the legality of
his title, and the testimony of toany artists con firmed the favorable judgments of the foreign critics, so that the committee reported to the Douse on June 7. 1810, in favor of their pur chase for •35,000. The attacks against Lord Elgin were by no means eo»tined to the criticism of his marbles. His act was denounced violently as vandalism of the most flagrant kind, and the wrath of Lord Byron found expression in 'Chi1de Ha rold's' lament over walls defaced, the moldering shrines removed by 13ritish hands." There can be no doubt that in the re moval of some of the nwtopos Elgin's workmen had wrought considerable damage to what still remained of the Parthenon. after the explosion of 1687; but a large part of the sculptures were not in plaee, and those that had not fallen were a mark for the wanton destructiveness of the Turkish garrison. The accounts of contemporary travelers, and the present condition of what was left behind, show very plainly what would have been the fate of these masterpieces had they not been rescued. The Turks had already used many fragments in the walls of the Aeropo and of private houses, and a considerable mass of marble had only recently been burned to furnish lime for mortar. Consult: 'Michaelis, Der Parthenon (Leipzig, 1871) id., .1 ncient Marbles in Great Britain, trans. by Fennell (('ambridge. 1882) : .1 a•it at Ma rhl rg in the British Museum, vols. vi.-ix. (London. 1810-39: 1842): A. H. Smith. Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek (I Nil le 0 Man .4 //liquifies (London, 1892). For the subjects of these sculp see PAR'rlIENo\; for their place in the history of Greek art, see GREEK Aar.