'The Real Life of the Parthenon' review: Who owns the Elgin Marbles?

“They were created in a short time for all time. Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and at once antique, but in the freshness of its vigor it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought.” Thus Plutarch described the buildings on the Acropolis as a showcase of Periclean Athens. Although he was writing half a millennium after the Parthenon was built, he touched on the essence of its enduring appeal. Few complexes have cast a greater spell on later generations and even fewer boast such a strange afterlife, its component parts dismembered and divided between Athens and London, its heritage contested and the source of debates that seem to generate more heat than light.

THE REAL LIFE OF THE PARTHENON Author: Patricia Vigderman Publisher: Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press Pages: 195 Price: $21.95

The afterlife of ancient art and architecture is the subject of “The Real Life of the Parthenon” by Patricia Vigderman, a professor of English at Kenyon College whose previous book was “Possibility: Essays Against Despair.” Part memoir, part travelogue and part musing on cultural patrimony, her new book is a voyage around the ancient world in which she examines the issues raised by the migration of art in the modern era. Her quest takes her from Athens and Pompeii to Manhattan and Malibu as she confronts the paradox of ownership and wrestles with conflicting evidence. Is the universality of art a pernicious concept, a form of “cultural strip mining,” or is it an acknowledgment of art as part of our common humanity? Should works of art be repatriated to their countries of origin and is that always the right decision? These are big questions, and our answers depend on whether we believe a work’s original context is paramount.

Vigderman’s approach is informed by Walter Benjamin’s concept of an object’s aura, a property embedded in time and history. Deprived of its original location, the object’s aura is diminished; yet do major works like the Parthenon marbles belong only to one place, since so many of them have resided in the British Museum for two centuries? Have they not now acquired a different aura, given their impact on generations of artists, from Canova and Rodin to Henry Moore? Mary Beard, whose astute history of the Parthenon lies behind Vigderman’s study, has described the marbles as “valued because of their deracination,” which charges them with a “cultural electricity.”

Vigderman approaches her subject evenhandedly, noting that the repatriation of works of art can be seen as a victory for local communities and their sense of identity, but she also spots the questionable ties between the handiwork of an ancient Greek vase painter, say, and the inhabitants of modern-day Paestum. Indeed, Vigderman experiences a kind of epiphany in Paestum, where she recognizes that “fault lines run through any claims on antiquity.” In the end, she acknowledges both the internationalists who say that no one owns antiquity and those who subscribe to a work of art’s right to repatriation. She appreciates that a sculpture of an ancient goddess would be seen by far more people at the Getty than in its new residence at Aidone in Sicily, but accepts that the sense of justice behind its return to Italy is hard to gainsay. And she marvels at the gleaming new Acropolis Museum, where tourism and propaganda have reshaped a cultural landscape.

Behind the examples in this thoughtful book lies the realization that the relationship between the spectator and art is inevitably complex. After all, we can’t return art or history to a lost past; as the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion observed: “The backward look transforms its object. ... History cannot be touched without changing it.”

Bruce Boucher is the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum and the author of Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time

© 2018 The New York Times