A spokeswoman for the British Museum suggested the Museum would be willing to loan the disputed fragments for “the length of time for an average loan of objects” (presumably several months), provided Greece recognized British ownership. The Guardian reported the response of the Greek Culture Minister, Antonis Samaras:

Three months won’t be enough to take them out of their boxes… As a time frame, it’s bizarre. And agreeing to the condition [of ownership] would be like sanctifying [Lord] Elgin’s deeds and legitimising the theft of the marbles and the break-up of the monument 207 years ago. No Greek government could accept that.

On Monday Lord Owen weighed in via a letter to The Times:

The only way that the Elgin Marbles can make periodic visits to the new Acropolis Museum, which is highly desirable, is if there is an EU cultural treaty couched in general terms allowing for the transfer of antiquities between the museums of member states in a way that guarantees, under international law, all aspects of their movement. In this way the EU would be demonstrating that it is a unique international organisation capable of ensuring the cultural heritage of its citizens without establishing precedents that could lead to the return to their country of origin of many objets d’art which enrich the museums of the EU member states.

What such a vaguely well-intentioned “cultural treaty” might entail, and how it might interact alongside such existing bodies such as the UN and UNESCO remains a mystery. The apologetic tone creeping into British public discourse on the subject is interesting to observe, but it didn’t stop British Museum director Neil MacGregor from declining the invitation to attend the opening of the Acropolis Museum.

This morning, the inimitable Christopher Hitchens commented on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” with text and audio here. Hitchens wrote The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? back in 1998 and The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification in 2008. The word “reunification” is a telling, almost moving one. Hitchens in his NPR spot again makes a point that is all too often lost amid questions of cultural patrimony and legal precedent: the Parthenon frieze is a narrative artwork. Like so much fragmentary ancient art, its aesthetic appeal is now commonly divorced from its narrative content/context. Understanding of any narrative artwork cannot benefit from fragmentation, interruption and dispersal. Hitchens argues that the cultural “continuity” of the Greek claim on the Parthenon marbles is “unique” (a somewhat debatable assertion), and that recent restitutions by the Vatican, the German government, and the Italian government of Parthenon fragments is a sign of international recognition that the British cannot afford to ignore.

But in the midst of the international hubbub, the artworks themselves seem to be most often ignored. On Monday more evidence was published by British Museum conservation scientists that suggests the Parthenon sculptures were, like many works of the period and afterward, originally brilliantly polychromatic. Specifically, the belt on the figure of Iris (below) has traces of pigment known as Egyptian blue, which emits infrared-like radiation that can be captured by a camera.

The figure of Iris from the west pediment of the Parthenon. Image: Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2007 in WikiMedia

Flecks of color have also been observed on fragments of the frieze in Athens, but have yet to be analyzed. Must we wait until this latest flare-up of nationalistic temper on both sides has cooled to remember the continued importance of the sculptures themselves?

As of today, the final post indicates that the blog “will remain public for the next few weeks, after which it will be permanently deleted.” Personally, I hope that this isn’t so. It is a valuable record that does not deserve to be expunged.

This demonstration by a research team from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Digital Collections and Content Interface looks particularly interesting. Patchwork Prototyping a Collection Dashboard explores some of the problems of context, displacement, and too much/too little information that researchers, students, educators and the interested public face when searching for objects:

What if we could provide users of the system a quick, easy way to get a 10,000 foot view of a collection? From this vantage point, individual items fall back to reveal the larger contours of a collection landscape. What are the high points? Where are there gaps? Does this look like a promising place to dig deeper for the kinds of items that will answer my research questions? What kind of landscape does this item come from? Will this collection lead me to find other things like it?

This type of system is extremely exciting because it might allow museums to maximize the accessibility their online presence without completely sacrificing the benefit of physically visiting the collection. Effectively translating the important didactic elements of the physical gallery to an digital environment is already one of the most challenging tasks to curators and their collaborative teams today. Are we ready for Curatorship 2.0?

Late 1st century BC fresco fragment. Image: J. Paul Getty Museum.

More details emerged today about the Roman fresco to be returned next month by the Getty.The LA Times reports that the fragment was among the objects gifted by the collectors Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman in 1996. From the Times:

Getty officials didn’t decide to repatriate the fragment until about a year ago, when an image of it appeared in a catalog published by the Italian Ministry of Culture, said Karol Wight, the Getty’s curator of antiquities. The catalog included a “conjectural reconstruction,” she said, suggesting that the fragment and two others previously returned to Italy — one by the Los Angeles museum, also donated by the Fleischmans; the other by New York collector Shelby White — were once part of the same artwork.

Fleischman, White and…Medici? This trio of names is beginning to have a familiar ring when in the context of repatriation, especially where it concerns the Getty. See Looting Matters for a speculative reconstruction of the three returned fresco fragments, along with conjecture of a fourth fragment associated with convicted former art dealer Giacomo Medici.

Edit: The fragment 96.AG.170 appears on page 216 of The Handbook of the Antiquities Collection and is dated between 50 – 25 BC by the Getty.

Said Director Michael Brand: “Our decision to return this fragment is based on a newly published image we saw about a year ago that included another fresco fragment that was being repatriated to Italy by a private collector. This image placed our landscape fresco alongside this newly repatriated fragment.”

Seeing these fragments together made it clear that the two were part of the same wall design and belonged together.

This AP item quotes a spokeswoman in stating that the fragment was not believed to have been looted. As yet, an image of the fragment in question has not been included in any items about the return.

1st century polychrome statue of an Amazon, found in Herculaneum in 2006. Image: Riccardo Giordano.

In February 2008 I attended a fascinating talk on ancient polychromy at the Courtauld Institute, given by Jan Stubbe Østergaard, archaeologist and curator of ancient art at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Østergaard gave a survey of the current state of knowledge about ancient polychromy, or the use of color on statues and reliefs, from Archaic Greek to late 3rd-century Roman works. A systematic technological and scientific investigation of this area is relatively new, though scholars like Wilhelm Lermann produced important works in the early 20th century that noted traces of polychromy in sculpture as well as architecture. Now, what we know about how, why, and which colors decorated sculpture in the ancient Greek and Roman world is being illuminated by new technological approaches.

For an idea as to the kind of work being done by conservators at the Getty Institute or the Copenhagen Polychromy Network, this abstract to a 2006 article presented at the Munich Congress, “The Object in Context: Crossing Conservation Boundaries,” is an interesting read. Now, three years later, the head of an Amazon (?) pictured above, found in Herculaneum in 2006, is now the subject of an intensive joint digital study by the University of Warwick, the University of Southampton, and the Herculaneum Conservation Project. Most of the face is missing; see a similar type for comparison. An unique camera rig was used to map the sculpture with a technique called Polynomial Texture Mapping, or PMT. More information is available from the University of Southampton here at the School of Humanities/Archaeology page, here in their News section, and here at the School of Electronics and Computer Science page .

Amazon (?) from Herculaneum. Image: Courtesy of Riccardo Giordano

Ancient polychromy has become a subject with increased curatorial profile in recent years. Certainly it dovetails with critical investigations into concepts of ancient subjectivity and perception by scholars like Jas Elsner. In September 2007 the exhibition “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity” made its US debut at the Sackler Museum, having previously disconcerted its audiences in Copenhagen, Rome, Istanbul, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Athens, and Munich. In March 2008 the Getty Villa put on “The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present.”

To say that the subject is confrontational to our inherited 18th-19th century expectations of the “purity” (and its corollary, whiteness) of the art of classical cultures is a great understatement. “Gods in Color” included Egyptian and Near Eastern art, which for a variety of reasons, most of which related to Victorian ideologies of race, orientalism, and empire, fail to offend most viewers when shown as brightly decorated. Too often I am reminded of a mid-19th century watercolor from the British Museum’s Prints and Drawings, which depicts objects from the Museum’s ancient art collection according to a Victorian racial-aesthetic metric: Indian and African works occupy the bottom, sculptures taken from the Parthenon the top.

An Assemblage of Works of Art in Sculpture and Painting from the earliest period to the time of Phydias. Watercolor by James Stephanoff, 1854. British Museum, Prints and Drawings. Illustration source: Sloan, Kim, ed. Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century. British Museum Press, London, 2003.

This review at The Arts Fuse of “Gods in Color” is a fine example of some of the ideological negotiations that polychromatic classical works provoke: the author “thrashes about” trying to accommodate the “appallingly chintzy” recreated polychromy with his purist instincts: “The coolness and purity of Greek sculpture ….its…subtlety….never existed in the minds of its makers.”

But parsing the dismay registered by some viewers is perhaps the least exciting issue raised by modern speculative recreations. The simple fact is that ancient perceptions of color, naturalism, and “authenticity” are all up for debate. Were statues repainted to look new? Were they allowed to weather? If they were repainted, did successive applications of pigment change to follow stylistic trends? What relationship, if any, did the application of color and gilding to large-scale cult statues bear to other care-taking activities, such as dressing, perfuming, and ornamenting? The challenge to scholars and conservators to excavate the great stylistic variety, subtlety, and visual strategies (creating depth and impact from a great height or distance, etc.) that evidence of ancient polychromy suggests is exciting, the possibilities new and fresh.

Fragment of a 2nd century BC bronze equestrian statue found by a fisherman. Image: AP, courtesy of the Greek Ministry of Culture.

Via AP:

A Greek fisherman recovered a fragment of a bronze equestrian statue off the island of Kos. The statue is believed to be of a seated male rider with an ornate breastplate over a short tunic, holding a short sword. A fragment of the rider’s torso with outstretched right arm was caught in a fisherman’s net. Greek Ministry officials are dating the fragment to the late second century BC.

Via ANSA:

A recently discovered relief will join the ongoing show “Herculaneum: Three Centuries of Discoveries” at the Naples Archaeological Museum.

“The relief is particularly fascinating for scholars as we are not yet certain exactly the tale that is being reproduced on the work,” explained Herculaneum’s excavation chief Maria Paola Guidobaldi. ”It almost certainly shows Dionysius and what appears to be one of his female followers, a Maenad, dancing. However, there are also two other figures, one with men’s hair and the other wearing female clothes that aren’t yet clear.”

The relief was discovered by accident last month, attached to the eastern wall of a room inside a luxurious residential building. Presumably it was designed as a pair (the other relief was originally located on the southern wall of the same room, removed in 1997). What does the other relief depict? And where is it located today?

Via the BBC:

Excavations for a parking lot in Somerset have revealed several finds, including some “very unusual” Roman graves. Finds from this and other excavations will be on display at the Museum of Somerset, though hopefully we will not have to wait until the museum reopens in 2010 to learn more about them.

True appeared and responded to the testimony of archaeologist Daniela Rizzo, whose testimony has been used by the prosecution in both cases. Ms. Rizzo suggested that as a “an archaeologist, a scholar and a great expert,” True ” had the knowledge to recognize objects that could have come from Etruria [where they had been illegally excavated].” Rizzo stated further that collaboration with Italian archaeologists in the first place would have been “more useful” than the retroactive position the Getty (and many other institutions) now find themselves in.

“If ever there was an indication of proof of an object coming from a certain place,” or an illegal excavation, “we would deaccession it and return the object, regardless of the statute of limitations,” Ms. True said. “And we have shown that we would.”

True also contends that the Getty followed “proper procedures” when buying objects on the art market, including communicating with officials in the Italian Ministry of Culture to determine if objects were flagged or had liens against them. True’s lawyers are planning an object-by-object examination of the 35 contested artifacts acquired by the museum during True’s tenure. They have also argued that the Italian government failed to provide proof of looting, or even warn the museum that objects being purchased were suspected to have been illegally excavated or exported.

To date, the Getty has agreed to return some 40 contested artifacts. Back in July 2007 this agreement prompted Sharon Waxman to blog that it signaled a likely end to True’s trial, according to one of the Italian state prosecutors. With the decision to fight on an object-by-object basis, certainly some interesting information may finally come to light as to their provenance and acquisition, but an end appears nowhere in sight.

Protest banners in December.

“The Acropolis is our only weapon,” said archaeologist Aspasia Rarri. “Closing it has political and financial costs for the government.”

Last week marked the fifth time the Athenian Acropolis has been closed by protesters in two weeks. The ongoing strike of the employees of the Greek Ministry of Culture form only a small part of the recent unrest in that country, but has succeeded in attracting the world’s attention. The costs of these closures have not been fully estimated yet, especially during a dismal year for Greek tourism. What will be the impact on the new Acropolis Museum? How might these developments change the renewed discourse on the return on the Elgin marbles?

The latest AP reports are here and here.