Sensemaker Daily
Greece’s prime minister will meet Keir Starmer today and Rishi Sunak tomorrow to discuss his longstanding request for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.
Starmer and Sunak will both say they’re interested in loaning back the sculptures but can’t return them permanently because the law forbids it.
So what? This isn’t true (see below).
Moreover
- if it were true, the law could be amended;
- 63 per cent of Britons now want the marbles returned; and
- the museum’s reputation as a responsible custodian has in any case been wrecked by scandal.
The Act. The British Museum Act 1963 states clearly that the museum’s trustees “may sell, exchange, give away or otherwise dispose of any object vested in them and comprised in their collection if… in the opinion of the Trustees the object is unfit to be retained in the collections of the Museum and can be disposed of without detriment to the interests of students”.
Nazi loot. The reason recent UK governments have been able to hide behind the act as a reason not to return the marbles is a 2005 ruling by a senior judge that it didn’t even permit the return of Nazi loot to its rightful owners.
Andrew Morritt, then head of the chancery division of the High Court, said new legislation would be needed to return four old master drawings seized by the Gestapo (and later bought by the museum) to their owners in the Czech republic.
Since then:
- A new law has been passed to get the drawings returned, but it applies only to Nazi loot and expired in 2019.
- The museum’s other arguments for keeping the marbles have been dismantled by Geoffrey Robertson KC in Who Owns History?, in which he makes a compelling case that Lord Elgin (1766-1841) did not have permission to take them from the Acropolis in Athens; that the museum knew this when it bought them from him in 1816; and that its current claim on them should be considered invalid under international law.
- France’s President Macron has thrown down a gauntlet to the museum by announcing the return of looted treasures from Paris to Benin.
- The Vatican has returned three Parthenon sculptures to Athens, including a magnificent horse’s head.
- The unsolved theft of some 2,000 items over three decades from the museum’s classical collection has made a mockery of its claim to be able to look after priceless treasures better than their original owners.
Insult. Elgin claimed to have a “firman” from the Sultan of Constantinople allowing him to remove the marbles. No such document has ever been produced; the museum has only a purported Italian translation, not signed by the sultan. Elgin stole the sculptures and the idea of loaning them back now has “the insulting consequence that possession will always reside with the nation that dispossessed them,” Robertson argues. “It reduces the guilt now felt by the thief, but does nothing to assuage the feelings of the victim.”
The interests of students. The 1963 Act takes these interests seriously, and they can be accommodated with replicas, as Judge Morritt knows. His ancestral pile, Rokeby Park in Yorkshire, was for nearly 100 years home to the Rokeby Venus, the only surviving nude by Diego Velasquez. In 1906 it was sold to the National Gallery where it has been damaged twice, first by suffragettes and this year by Just Stop Oil. But students will not be able to tell the difference between the original and the replica still hanging in Rokeby Park.
The anguish of Greece. Having the Parthenon sculptures split between Athens and London is like cutting the Mona Lisa in half, Kyriakis Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, said yesterday. He’s not happy with progress towards their restitution. Nor should he be.
Is Starmer worried that returning the sculptures would offend the same demographic as speaking his mind about Brexit?
The Labour party was approached for comment.
