The British Museum’s Blockbuster Scandals

Charles Townley, one amongst Britain’s first mountainous collectors of antiquities, modified into as soon as born in Lancashire in 1737. A distaff descendant of the aristocratic Howard family, he modified into as soon as trained largely in France—a frequent direction for a successfully-born Catholic Englishman. Trim and colorful, Townley modified into as soon as, essentially essentially based totally on an early biographical sketch, eagerly welcomed into Continental society, “from the dissipations of which it’d be wrong to assert that he wholly escaped.” As a young adult, he returned to England and save in himself at the family estate, having near accurate into a lavish inheritance. But before lengthy he save of abode off off for Italy, in what would possibly likely maybe be the first of three visits. In a dozen years, he accumulated more than two hundred feeble sculptures, along with other objects.

It modified into as soon as an correct moment for a particular person of arrive to make this kind of series. Many Italian nobles had been seeing their fortunes dwindle, and ought to be persuaded to phase with inherited objects for the true trace. In Naples, Townley provided from the Principe di Laurenzano a Roman bust of a young lady with downcast eyes, identified as the nymph Clytie. (Later, Townley humorously referred to Clytie as his necessary other, though he modified into as soon as now not the marrying sort.) Excavations had been then beneath formulation at Hadrian’s Villa, the retreat that the Emperor had built exterior Rome, and collectors raced to aquire artwork works as soon as they had been eliminated from the bottom. An élite seller named Thomas Jenkins, who saved a situation on the By capacity of del Corso for exhibiting feeble wares, provided Townley, among other objects, a statue of a bare, muscled discus thrower. From the seventeen-eighties onward, Townley showed off his series in his London town home, near St. James’s Park. A painting by Johan Zoffany, first exhibited beneath the title “A Nobleman’s Series,” depicts Townley and so a lot of chums in a library stuffed with dozens of marbles, including a seven-foot Venus on a pedestal—her arm raised and her draperies lowered. In the background are picket cupboards by which Townley presumably housed smaller treasures, including infinite cameos and intaglios.

Townley’s museum modified into as soon as mentioned to despicable below most efficient a handful of other non-public collections in Europe in breadth and quality. Per Max Bryant, the creator of a 2017 monograph on Townley and his home, the series additionally reflected “an eighteenth-century attitude to artwork that itself has change into lost to modernity.” At the time, feeble sculptures had been normally restored true after being excavated—frequently boldly. Students have concluded that Clytie’s bosom modified into as soon as enhanced to intensify the bust’s erotic cost; Townley’s discobolus, unearthed in a remark of decapitation, modified into as soon as fitted with a head from a undeniable sculpture.

In 1791, Townley modified into as soon as made a trustee of the British Museum. The first nationwide public museum, it modified into as soon as established by an act of Parliament, in 1753, and modified into as soon as initially formed around the series of Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish physician and businessman. When Townley died, in 1805, the museum bought his sculptures for the then mighty sum of twenty thousand pounds, and a gallery showcasing them opened three years later.

But Townley’s series modified into as soon as soon decisively eclipsed. By 1810, aficionados of feeble sculpture had begun clamoring to position a question to a undeniable cache of feeble marbles, which modified into as soon as being housed in a shed in Mayfair. One young artist, Benjamin Robert Haydon, wrote, of seeing the works, “I felt as if a divine fact had blazed inwardly upon my mind, and I knew that they would sooner or later rouse the artwork of Europe from its slumber within the darkness.” These sculptures got right here now not from Italy but from Ottoman-occupied Athens, where they had been pried from, or in any other case mute around, the ruins of the Parthenon, at the instruction of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin.

In 1799, Lord Elgin, a Scottish nobleman thirty-uncommon years Townley’s junior, arrived in Constantinople as Britain’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The mission of getting rid of the marbles from the Parthenon, the fifth-century temple on the Acropolis, and transport them to Britain took more than a decade—about half of of the distinctive 5-hundred-and-twenty-four-foot frieze modified into as soon as eliminated, as had been a replacement of existence-size statues from the pediments. Elgin initially intended to put in all of it at Broomhall, his ancestral home, northwest of Edinburgh. But he ran into monetary difficulties, and in 1816 the Parthenon marbles, plus dozens of other sculptures from the Acropolis, had been bought from Elgin by Parliament for the British Museum. The cost, thirty-5 thousand pounds, modified into as soon as save of abode by comparability with the Townley series, but the esteemed sculptor Joseph Nollekens declared, “I reckon them very grand increased than the Townley marbles for beauty.”

The arrival in Britain of what turned identified as the Elgin Marbles encouraged an appreciation of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of the feeble Greeks over their later Roman copyists. The point out of the marbles—sooner or later, in a custom-built gallery seriously better than the one featuring Townley’s series—additionally helped set the educate of leaving fragmentary statues unrestored. Though the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles modified into as soon as controversial from the starting up (Lord Byron decried their removing from the Acropolis as vandalism), the sculptures’ significance modified into as soon as abruptly acknowledged. They had been so prized, finally, that soon after Greece turned an autonomous remark, in 1830, it demanded the statues again—a seek info from that British diplomats have continuously rejected.

Over time, the recognition of Townley’s marbles gradually declined. The gallery dedicated to his series modified into as soon as demolished in 1841, at some level of an growth of the museum, and a good deal of sculptures that he’d bought migrated to storerooms. Already hidden away had been the cameos, intaglios, and other dinky objects from his series, which had been bought from his inheritor in 1814. Many of those objects had now not been completely documented, and this intended that when a few of them started disappearing no person even observed that they had been long gone.

In the previous year or so, the British Museum has been wrestling—frequently in public, and frequently to its mighty embarrassment—with what would possibly likely maybe successfully be characterized as the twin legacies of Townley and Elgin. In unhurried 2022, reviews emerged that the chair of the museum’s trustees, George Osborne, modified into as soon as in negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and that a deal would possibly likely maybe successfully be struck to allow the Parthenon Sculptures, as they’re in actual fact in most cases known as, to be despatched, in some model, to Greece. Many Britons have lengthy most well liked resolving the diplomatic stalemate; others branded the belief atrocious. Quickly after Osborne turned chair, a headline within the Day-to-day Particular warned, “don’t let british museum or elgin marbles be caught by woke ideology.” No longer lengthy later on, the museum modified into as soon as jolted by scandal when it modified into as soon as published that a entire bunch of objects—including cameos and intaglios as soon as owned by Townley—had been stolen, and a few of them provided off, over a length of a protracted time, it appears by a member of the museum’s own curatorial workers. The Day-to-day Mail contributed a normally lurid summation: “hunt for necessary gem stones stolen in netflix-model heist.”

The sensational headlines had been seriously deceptive: within the context of feeble archeology, the length of time “gem” normally refers to now not diamonds or rubies but to engraved semiprecious stones or objects solid from glass. Enlightenment-period connoisseurs corresponding to Townley every so often provided the less invaluable of those objects by the handful. (Cameos are carved in raised reduction, intaglios in unfavorable reduction.) Their feeble householders prized them as exiguous works of artwork. Per Martin Henig, a senior academic customer at the College of Oxford’s College of Archaeology, Roman emperors appear to have given cameos, which had been with ease transportable, as tributes or gifts to proper political alliances. Even quite standard people would possibly likely maybe aspire to own a tumbler gem, save of abode in a signet ring, depicting a god or a mythological decide of private significance. A pitcher gem found at a Roman fortress near the city of Oxford parts a horse and a cornet, suggesting that its proprietor modified into as soon as a horn-playing member of the cavalry. Henig told me, “The supreme of the cameos, and essentially the most efficient of the intaglios, had been likely rather more extremely valued than sculptures,” which had been frequently heavily produced in workshops. The designs of such artists as Dioskourides, a gem engraver who labored for Emperor Augustus, had been extremely coveted. This day, essentially the most prized gem stones can sell for a entire bunch of hundreds of bucks. For scholars, the significance of the gem stones lies now not true of their beauty but additionally within the sunshine their iconography sheds on feeble concerns and preoccupations.

The uproar over the Townley thefts and the controversy over the Elgin discussions imply that the British Museum has been within the headlines to an abnormal extent for a cultural institution, even one which modified into as soon as final year’s most visited tourist enchantment in London. But it modified into as soon as inevitable that the British Museum would change into the level of hobby of scrutiny. The museum, a repository of more than eight million artifacts from around the field, most of them bought at some level of Britain’s reign as an imperial overlord, holds now not true classical sculptures but additionally Anglo-Saxon weapons, Chinese ceramics, Assyrian wall panels, and the Rosetta Stone. Along with same institutions, corresponding to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Contemporary York, the British Museum has an increasing selection of confronted moral questions about the procedure in which it accumulated its series. As well to being petitioned by the Greeks, the British Museum is being challenged for its holding of bronzes looted within the unhurried nineteenth century by British forces from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria. Restitution claims have additionally been made relating to sacred objects from Ethiopia.

The Townley thefts had been facilitated by the undeniable fact that curators had by no arrive completely recorded many of the objects in inner catalogues or databases. Indeed, it modified into as soon as reported that particular person info for some 2.4 million objects at the British Museum had been missing, calling into quiz its lengthy-standing, and each so often arrogantly expressed, assert to be an unimpeachable custodian for inclined artifacts. For some observers, it modified into as soon as an irresistible irony that true thefts had occurred at an establishment lengthy accused of cultural theft. When a British TV channel requested viewers to make contributions solutions for quit-of-year jokes, the museum modified into as soon as the butt of the winning entry: “Did you hear concerning the Christmas cake on point out within the British Museum? It modified into as soon as Stollen.”

The British Museum has by no arrive been merely a trove of comely artwork works. It modified into as soon as additionally intended, thru the depths of its holdings, to be an archive of the field—a library of things. It modified into as soon as established by eighteenth-century polymaths as an expression of the Enlightenment conviction that accepted truths would possibly likely maybe successfully be arrived at thru intellectual inquiry and scientific motive. The museum’s wildly disparate collections would possibly likely maybe by no arrive be c ompiled this day, which is each and each the institution’s strength and its level of weak point. Why ought to the sarcophagi of Egyptian kings or the fragments of feeble Greek structure be housed in London, and claimed in some sense as British? Townley, Elgin, and the opposite males whose acquisitions stuffed the institution’s galleries keep now not need procedure to be such questions; this day they’re, rightly, unavoidable. At a undeniable level in a museum’s historical previous, it becomes more than true a repository of the cultural and inventive previous, telling a fable concerning the historical previous of a nation, or a people, or the field. It additionally becomes a museum of itself—of its formation, its accumulating historical previous, its priorities, and its failings.

The British Museum’s painful self-examination would possibly likely maybe by no arrive have occurred had it now not been for the persistence of Ittai Gradel, a Danish seller and collector of antiquities. Gradel does now not hunt for discoveries within the excavated ruins of palaces and temples, as his eighteenth-century predecessors did. As yet another, he has frequently sifted thru that twenty-first-century situation of buried admire—eBay. He has labored at universities in Denmark and within the U.Ample., and has a undeniable hobby in feeble cameos and intaglios. But he modified into as soon as now not suited to academic existence, seeing himself more within the lineage of gentleman collectors who combined scholarship and connoisseurship with the joys of discovery.

A pair of years within the past, Gradel paid two thousand euros to a German auction home for what modified into as soon as described online as a neighborhood of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cameos. He later confirmed what he had suspected abruptly on analyzing a photograph of one amongst the pieces: it modified into as soon as an feeble Roman cameo of Germanicus Caesar which Johann Winckelmann—the German student who is regarded as the father of Western artwork historical previous—had described as one amongst the absolute top examples he’d ever viewed. The cameo’s whereabouts had been unknown for more than two hundred years. Gradel told me lately, “What I am making an are trying out for is the errors, and the stupidity, of other dealers and auction homes. That’s where the bargains are.”

Bigger than a dozen years within the past, Gradel modified into as soon as provided a reserve of glass and stone gem stones from yet another seller. The objects purportedly got right here from an estate sale performed within the North of England within the early twentieth century. Between 2010 and 2013, Gradel provided nearly three hundred of them. He provided a few and saved the reduction. The gem stones had been of such quality and quantity that he assumed they had been phase of an extinct aristocratic series gathered on a Enormous Tour; he had a hunch that they’ll have as soon as belonged to the Howard family, whose estate, in North Yorkshire, is now identified for its illustrious look within the 1981 adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited.” The family had provided some treasured-stone gem stones to the British Museum within the Victorian period, and Gradel theorized that these less invaluable glass gem stones can were provided off around the same time. Taking a look for info a pair of that you just would possibly additionally focal level on Howard connection, he despatched inquiries to curators within the British Museum’s Division of Greece and Rome, but got no response. In the period in-between, Gradel told me, “an increasing selection of of those gem stones saved turning up—the vender would command these had been the final, after which he would start yet another drawer, and there had been some more gem stones. I concluded, frankly, that he modified into as soon as aged and slightly dotty.” After 2011, the provision began to dwindle, and Gradel modified into as soon as knowledgeable that the seller, whose name modified into as soon as Paul Higgins, had died.

No longer lengthy later on, same gem stones started appearing on eBay. Gradel made inquiries concerning the origins of those things, and the seller mentioned that he’d inherited them from his grandfather Frank Nicholls, an antique-shop proprietor in York, who had died in 1953. Gradel checked the grandfather’s name in opposition to info available online; the most necessary parts aligned, aside from that Nicholls’s year of demise modified into as soon as in actual fact 1952. It modified into as soon as the form of mistake, Gradel figured, that will likely maybe without difficulty occur when info modified into as soon as handed down thru a family. But he observed one thing abnormal: this seller’s name modified into as soon as additionally Paul Higgins. “I finally requested him particularly if he modified into as soon as associated to this main Paul Higgins, who modified into as soon as now deceased, from whom I had provided so a lot of same gem stones some years before,” Gradel recalled. “He spoke back, ‘He’s no relation of mine. But I agree it’s an uncommon accident.’ ”

This Higgins gave the impact ignorant of the trace of what he had, every so often asking most efficient forty or fifty pounds for objects that Gradel would possibly likely maybe repeat had been price rather more, likely as grand as so a lot of thousand pounds. Infrequently he felt moved to train the seller concerning the supreme cost of his wares. Gradel spent a hundred and fifty pounds on a ring that he felt, essentially essentially based totally on the seller’s photo, modified into as soon as so successfully preserved it wanted to be a faux—within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imitations of feeble gem stones had proliferated among collectors. But when the ring arrived he modified into as soon as amazed to look at that it modified into as soon as customary, dating from the third century B.C. “So I wrote to him and mentioned, ‘I made a mistake. Now I have it in hand, I realize it’s the explicit deal,’ ” Gradel told me. He provided to near it, or to pay an extra 5 hundred pounds. The seller authorised the money. “That it’s likely you’ll also command that modified into as soon as jolly decent of me,” Gradel outlined. “But it modified into as soon as additionally, clearly, on story of I needed to be in his appropriate books. If he had more objects in his drawers, I would esteem for him to near again to me first.”

After Gradel provided a solid-glass gem from the seller, he modified into as soon as happy to look at that, essentially essentially based totally on an eighteenth-century catalogue, it had as soon as belonged to none instead of Charles Townley. Gradel modified into as soon as slightly surprised, having believed that every particular person amongst Townley’s gem stones had long gone to the British Museum. He concluded that this one need to were disposed of in yet another model, and procedure no more about it.

Gradel’s interactions with the eBay seller, though, grew an increasing selection of perplexing. At one level, the seller listed a neighborhood of objects very like the ones he’d mentioned had near from his grandfather’s shop, but asserted that he’d provided this cache in a junk shop. Gradel outlined to me, “Most of those feeble glass objects are now not that frequent, so it’d be slightly irregular that he himself took situation to stumble at some level of a batch of precisely the same form. It modified into as soon as now not impossible, but it modified into as soon as an uncanny accident.” It modified into as soon as additionally uncommon, he procedure, that the seller had provided the objects in a junk shop within the first situation, given his apparent lack of information of their cost and provenance. But Gradel reassured himself that the seller modified into as soon as simply “clueless,” on story of many of the objects “had been completely misdescribed.”

Besides after they weren’t. “A pair of of the objects had been fully accurately described online as feeble,” Gradel mentioned. “That modified into as soon as additionally uncommon.” Gradel began to mediate that the seller modified into as soon as hiding one thing: “Every little bit of evidence would possibly be innocently outlined, but the sum total began appearing rather irregular.”

Then, in 2016, one thing even stranger took situation: the seller posted on eBay a fraction of an onyx cameo featuring a young lady in profile alongside Priapus, the god of fertility. Gradel identified the fragment as one which had been described in a 1926 British Museum catalogue of engraved gem stones and cameos. The cameo, Gradel mentioned, modified into as soon as now not listed on the museum’s Net situation, however, and he level-headed believed that the seller modified into as soon as appearing in appropriate religion: “Regardless that it modified into as soon as clearly a case of theft from the museum, it it appears most likely had taken situation many, a protracted time within the past—before his grandfather had died, in 1952.” He made inquiries about procuring the fragment, most efficient to be knowledgeable by the seller that he’d posted it in error: it in actual fact belonged to his sister, who did now not must let dawdle of it. Gradel persevered to aquire from the seller till 2018.

In Can also, 2020, Gradel modified into as soon as checking the British Museum’s Net situation when he made an alarming discovery: a photograph of the cameo fragment depicting the girl and Priapus. So it did belong to the museum. On eBay, however, the cameo’s gold mount had been eliminated. “Clearly, the museum’s photo would possibly likely maybe now not likely predate 1952—that told me the provenance story modified into as soon as a lie,” Gradel mentioned. “And if the seller had been lying to me about that, I could likely maybe believe fully nothing he had told me.” He went again thru his info and found that the name on his final PayPal receipt, from 2018—essentially the most efficient one recent enough to remain accessible on his online story—modified into as soon as now not Paul Higgins but Peter Higgs. In a phone conversation with a colleague within the U.Ample., Gradel described his confusion. “I mentioned, ‘I don’t trace it, his true name is Peter Higgs, and he’s been lying, and there’s some trickery occurring.’ And my colleague mentioned, ‘You attain trace, don’t you, that that’s the name of a curator at the British Museum?’ After which all my hair stood on quit.” If the thief modified into as soon as a talented curator, then Gradel had been tricked in extra ways than one: the disagreeable valuations of some objects hadn’t been a signal of lack of information but, rather, a crafty formulation for Higgs to disguise his identification.

A pair of year earlier, Gradel had been provided, by a middleman, a fraction of a stone gem being provided by a retired seller and collector, Malcolm Hay; after analyzing it, he had determined in opposition to procuring it. Later, he had found this gem, too, listed on the British Museum’s Net situation, and handed observe on to Hay. Gradel then learned that the gem had near from the same eBay seller with whom Gradel had done industrial. In the summertime of 2020, Hay alerted the museum that one amongst its catalogued objects had been provided on the starting up market. He modified into as soon as told that the matter would possibly likely maybe be investigated. At the time, the pandemic had closed the museum to online page visitors, and curators had been working from home. “I need to have procedure it modified into as soon as a reasonably easy process of going into the solid room and checking whether or now not the object modified into as soon as there,” Gradel mentioned. “But there modified into as soon as no urgency, on story of there modified into as soon as lockdown, and museum workers couldn’t discover into the museum anyway. So the thief couldn’t hold the rest.”

The museum reopened in August, 2020, permitting most efficient a dinky replacement of online page visitors and workers. By early 2021, as far as Gradel knew, an inquiry into Hay’s assert had now not been performed, so he wrote an email to the museum’s deputy director, Jonathan Williams, outlining intimately the compromising info he had gleaned about three objects that perceived to were stolen from the museum: the Townley gem, the onyx cameo, and the Hay fragment. He shared what he knew concerning the identification of the seller, and named Peter Higgs, the British Museum curator, as the likely culprit. In the email, Gradel neatly-known with terror that the museum had it appears left “Townley gem stones lying around for over 200 years without ever doing even essentially the most cursory registration,” including, “The shortage of registration would were an start invitation to a thief, since no person would then pass over them . . . and their presence within the collections would possibly likely maybe by no arrive be proven when they had left” the British Museum. There modified into as soon as, he declared, “no decent clarification of what I have right here found.”

Diverse months after Gradel wrote his letter, the British Museum launched a new chairman of its board of trustees: George Osborne, the old Conservative To find collectively baby-kisser and the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016. Osborne modified into as soon as born to inherited wealth and social despicable—he is the inheritor apparent to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon, an Irish title—and modified into as soon as most efficient identified as the architect of austerity, a coverage of radical public-spending cuts initiated when the Tories took energy in 2010. Austerity rendered Osborne deeply unpopular—hundreds booed him when he seemed at a carrying tournament—and his political occupation modified into as soon as cut rapid in 2016, when he and Prime Minister David Cameron found themselves on the dropping, skilled-E.U. facet of the Brexit referendum.

Many cultural observers had been dismayed that a particular person that had inflicted harsh cuts on British cultural institutions would now abet lead the country’s most infamous museum. But none would possibly likely maybe dispute that he modified into as soon as peerlessly connected within the nation-states of politics and finance. It modified into as soon as additionally easy to believe that Osborne would possibly likely maybe esteem to burnish a new legacy for himself.

By the time Osborne took over as chair, a necessary refurbishment of the museum had lengthy been scheduled. The museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, who previously oversaw the remark collections in Dresden, had been appointed, in 2016, with the forbidding mandate of making a grasp procedure to renovate the museum and toughen its displays, permitting them to be modernized in teach to designate collections more coherently. Plans had additionally been laid for a new archeological-research facility in Reading, forty miles exterior London. (It opens later this year.) The museum’s trustees likely hoped that Osborne, along with his ties to global finance, would possibly likely maybe be instrumental in elevating the billion pounds of private money reportedly required to finance these initiatives.

Osborne, for his phase, modified into as soon as desirous to solve the apparently intractable assert of the museum’s possession of the Parthenon Sculptures. No longer lengthy after being appointed to the board, he reportedly met privately in London with Prime Minister Mitsotakis. In subsequent months, the males persevered their unofficial conversation, sooner or later arriving at the premise that some of the sculptures presently in London would possibly likely maybe successfully be dropped at Athens; reciprocally, the Greeks would lend for transient exhibition some treasures from their museums which had rarely ever, if ever, left the country. (The Conceal of Agamemnon, a gold funerary conceal from Mycenae, now on point out at the Nationwide Archaeological Museum in Athens, modified into as soon as mentioned in media reviews as one probability.) The proposal fell far making an are trying the total restitution that has lengthy been Greece’s acknowledged arrangement, but eager observers expressed self assurance that language would possibly be found to book clear of the inflammatory length of time “mortgage,” the utilization of which would possibly imply an acknowledgment—unacceptable to the Greeks—that the Parthenon Sculptures are legitimately owned by the British Museum. (One euphemism that has been regarded as, they mentioned, is “deposit.”)

Though the Parthenon is now regarded as the final illustration of Greek nationwide identification, when Lord Elgin arrived in Constantinople, in 1799, Athens had been beneath Ottoman rule for more than three hundred years. The Acropolis modified into as soon as then home to a jumble of buildings, including now not true the feeble temple—which, for a time, had been turned accurate into a Christian church—but additionally a Frankish tower and a quantity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Turkish structures.

Lord Elgin turned attracted to the Parthenon Sculptures before he observed them. He commissioned so a lot of artists, including an Italian painter, Giovanni Battista Lusieri, to head to Athens to procedure the marbles, hoping that such photos would possibly likely maybe encourage new trends within the arts and crafts of Britain. (Elgin had regarded as hiring a promising young British artist for the duty, but modified into as soon as save off by the rate demanded; consequently, J. M. W. Turner modified into as soon as now not despatched to Greece to render the ruins.) In 1801, the governing Turkish authority it appears knowledgeable an emissary of Elgin’s in Athens that fallen pieces of the temple would possibly be excavated and eliminated. As soon as work began at the placement, this permission modified into as soon as very liberally interpreted each and each by Elgin’s representatives, who started slicing sculptures off the constructing, and by the Turkish authorities, who appear to were bribed to ignore such actions.

Per William St. Clair’s book “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” by the level Elgin first visited Athens, in 1802, many of the Parthenon Sculptures had been already in packing cases, willing to be despatched by sea to England. The traipse modified into as soon as unsafe. One of the necessary ships carrying the heavy cargo sank off the Peloponnesian hump, requiring an costly salvage job. Elgin’s own return to England, in 1803, had a necessary disruption: he arrived in Paris true before battle modified into as soon as declared between Britain and France, and modified into as soon as detained as a prisoner of battle (albeit partly in a Pyrenean spa town). Some three years handed before he returned to Britain. When he did, he found himself ensnarled in a costly divorce that, along with the massive funds he had incurred to discover the Parthenon Sculptures, in a roundabout procedure led him to sell the marbles to Britain.

The museum’s accession of the marbles modified into as soon as incessantly controversial, now not least on story of any customary documentation of Elgin’s agreements with the Turkish authorities modified into as soon as lost. (Finest a reproduction, in Italian translation, stays.) The student and British Museum trustee Mary Beard, in her book “The Parthenon” (2002), writes that after Greece gained independence from Ottoman rule it made a precedence of highlighting its nationwide ancestry. Share of this mission modified into as soon as to flip the Acropolis accurate into a monument to the fifth century B.C. by getting rid of the entire lot that wasn’t classical from the placement. Constructions erected in later eras had been demolished, and shattered columns had been resurrected. Beard writes that the director of excavations hailed the placement as “cleansed of all barbaric additions, a noble monument to the Greek genius.” For the newly established nation, the temple’s symbolic potency modified into as soon as made the total increased by its earlier occupation and ravaging. Toward the quit of the nineteenth century, the Greek minister in London unsuccessfully requested that the frieze fragments be returned. In 2009, Greece made yet another argument, this one in bricks and mortar, by opening the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the hill; it entails a high-floor gallery showcasing the sculptures that Elgin left within the again of, with plaster casts pointedly filling within the gaps.

The British Museum has continuously defended its possession of the marbles, which despite the entire lot it’s now not favorite to true give away: essentially essentially based totally on the British Museum Act of 1963, it will’t deaccession any objects which have “change into vested within the Trustees by virtue of a reward or bequest,” aside from beneath dinky conditions. Elgin’s initial rivalry to Parliament—that he had averted the Turks from turning the sculptures into mortar—gave formulation, over time, to an institutional assert: that the marbles had been less inclined in a London museum than they would were if left exposed to the substances in Athens. (As early as the eighteen-fifties, however, concerns had been raised concerning the quit of London’s grime on the marbles.) In recent decades, people within the museum have stopped making this level so loudly, but a wall text within the museum subsequent to a caryatid from the Erechtheion—a column from yet another temple on the Acropolis, sculpted within the make of a girl, that modified into as soon as additionally dropped at Britain by Elgin—notes that the 5 caryatids that remained in situ, and are in actual fact within the Acropolis Museum, are “grand corroded after nearly two more centuries of weathering.”

Below the management of Neil MacGregor, the charismatic director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, the major argument made for the sculptures’ retention modified into as soon as that they had been phase of a worldwide fable: “the non-public series of every citizen of the field,” as MacGregor save it. In 2014, the museum loaned out one amongst its Parthenon Sculptures, a decide of the river god Ilissos, for the first time—but to the Order Hermitage Museum, in Russia, to now not an establishment in Greece.

Others have suggested that the sculptures, having been in England for two hundred years, are in actual fact phase of British historical previous, moreover Greek historical previous. After Hartwig Fischer turned director, he mounted the argument that transferring cultural heritage from its situation of birth into any museum—in London, Athens, or in other locations—modified into as soon as itself a “artistic act,” offering a revelatory commerce of context. At a cosmopolitan museum, a Greek sculpture would possibly likely maybe successfully be juxtaposed with a Persian one; the non secular iconography of one culture would possibly likely maybe successfully be readily when in contrast with that of others. The historical previous of the Parthenon, Fischer told a Greek newspaper, had in actual fact been “enriched” by the undeniable fact that some substances of it “are positioned in Athens and a few are in London, where six million people take a look at them as soon as a year.” (George Vardas, a journalist who helps the marbles’ repatriation, scoffed, “The imperialist patronage of the British Museum has no limits.”)

Any affiliation that will likely have the quit of restoring the sculptures to Greece regarded as if it’d be in warfare with the British Museum’s reputable situation. A press start by the institution’s board of trustees maintains that “there’s a mountainous public advantage to seeing the sculptures within the context of the field series of the British Museum.” To advocates of conserving the sculptures, Osborne’s attempted address Mitsotakis had the hallmark of a baby-kisser’s strategy: a transient resolution that overlooks inevitable consequences. Would a Parthenon settlement save of abode off the museum to be deluged with requires for the repatriation of other distant places treasures? And how would possibly likely maybe the institution guarantee that a sovereign nation would now not violate a mortgage settlement? Some observers of Greek domestic politics acknowledge that there would possibly be exiguous probability of any authorities there acquiescing to the marbles being shipped again to Britain.

For folks that feel that the supreme situation of the sculptures is in Greece, though, framing a return as a “deposit” would possibly likely maybe abet ease th e British public into accepting the concession. Lord Vaizey, a old Conservative culture minister, is now the chair of the Parthenon Project—a neighborhood, funded by a Greek businessman named John Lefas, that has been advocating for an settlement that will likely maybe result in a de-facto repatriation without explicitly calling it a Greek victory. Vaizey told me, “There’s an limitless phase of me that feels, if and when the sculptures had been reunited in that surroundings, it’d be one amongst those moments when people would command, nearly abruptly, ‘Why did we wait so lengthy?’ ” By early 2023, with Osborne working within the again of the scenes, the British Museum gave the impact closer than it had ever been to resolving its Elgin assert. But it modified into as soon as about to be overwhelmed by the effects of Townley’s now not neatly-known legacy.

After Gradel submitted his letter to Jonathan Williams, the deputy director of the British Museum, in February, 2021, he got an acknowledgment of receipt. A pair of months later, he prodded again, and lastly bought a rapid message from Williams. The museum, Williams mentioned, had performed a thorough investigation, “which found that the objects alive to are all accounted for . . . without a recommendation of any tainted-doing on behalf of any member of Museum workers.”

Gradel modified into as soon as incensed—if Williams modified into as soon as true, how had a half demonstrably from the museum’s series ended up on eBay? But his requests for further elucidation had been rebuffed in a subsequent email, by which Williams told him that his allegations had been “wholly untrue.” At this level, Gradel made sure to position in writing his consequent situation relating to his purchases. “As these my suspicions are, then, wholly untrue, I discover now not have any motive in anyway to suspect anything else I provided from that Ebay seller,” he wrote. “I am gay to in a roundabout procedure dawdle away this within the again of me.”

But Gradel would possibly likely maybe now not in actual fact let the matter dawdle. “I knew this modified into as soon as baloney, clearly,” he told me. “And, additionally, it implied that I had made a frivolous accusation in opposition to them. I don’t esteem having a popularity as someone who goes around bandying frivolous accusations in opposition to all and varied.” He did now not feel that he would possibly likely maybe dawdle abruptly to the board of trustees, since he had so lately been shut down by the museum’s administration. Nor would possibly likely maybe he arrive the police along with his suspicions. “I requested chums of mine, and so that they suggested me, ‘That it’s likely you’ll also’t attain anything else, since the sufferer of the crime you assert is the British Museum, and the injured discover collectively denies that a crime has even taken situation.’ ” Gradel modified into as soon as alive to with other scholars, including Martin Henig, at Oxford. Henig told me that Gradel “modified into as soon as clearly upset, since the British Museum true didn’t believe him.”

In 2022, Gradel contacted a museum trustee, Paul Ruddock, informing him of his suspicions and of his fears that a scandal modified into as soon as being coated up. Of route, the museum modified into as soon as already alive to that its earlier assurances to Gradel had been misplaced. In August, 2021, after Gradel wrote to Williams, a remark test of the Division of Greece and Rome had been performed, revealing “an item now not in its appropriate region within the Greece and Rome strongroom,” essentially essentially based totally on a later statement by the museum. In April, 2022, staffers launched a more intensive audit of the department’s holdings and found that approximately two thousand objects had been missing or damaged—in remark, cameos and intaglios. It seemed that the thief had tried to duvet his tracks by altering digital databases; a recent civil submitting alleges that Higgs made more than eighty edits “associated to stolen, partly stolen or damaged objects,” and that there modified into as soon as “no legit motive” for this process. He’s additionally suspected of getting inserted accurate into a museum catalogue a solid handwritten point out falsely suggesting that in 1963 the museum lost the stone fragment that modified into as soon as bought decades later by Malcolm Hay. (Higgs appears to have provided it in 2015.) Around the quit of 2022, the police had been discreetly known as in.

Objects going missing within museums, or being stolen from them, is rarely unparalleled, and the British Museum had skilled high-profile thefts before. In 1993, robbers broke into the museum thru the roof and made off with a quarter of a million bucks’ price of Roman money and jewellery. In 2002, a customer lifted a twenty-5-hundred-year-extinct Greek head from a closed gallery. Two years later, fifteen objects of medieval Chinese jewellery had been stolen. Museums are inclined to theft from insiders, too. In a infamous case from the nineteen-fifties, John Nevin, an assistant at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, modified into as soon as prosecuted for stealing some two thousand objects, including a desk that he modified into as soon as procedure to have smuggled out by hiding its legs down his pants. He had furnished his modest home with the loot, and modified into as soon as later sentenced to a pair years in penal complicated. “Taking the things turned an obsession as I modified into as soon as attracted by the great thing about them,” he reportedly confessed. In 2002, the London Sunday Cases despatched an undercover journalist to the British Museum’s Division of Greece and Rome to pose as a work trainee; the protection modified into as soon as so lax that the reporter modified into as soon as ready to smuggle an feeble Greek statue of a foot out of the gallery and former guards without being caught.

What modified into as soon as seriously lovely concerning the gem thefts, after they had been sooner or later made public, in August, 2023, modified into as soon as the seniority of the apparent culprit: Higgs, who modified into as soon as fired that month, had labored at the museum for three decades. Curators at the British Museum are extremely licensed but now not seriously successfully paid: a salary of around fifty thousand bucks for an skilled curator is now not abnormal. The rewards of the job are now not completely monetary; many curators have dedicated their lives to a narrow specialization and have a profound dedication to the objects of their care. The premise that a curator can have now not true stolen objects but actively damaged them by getting rid of gold settings—presumably to sell the substances separately—appalled old colleagues.

Paradoxically, Higgs had been liberally quoted within the Sunday Cases exposé concerning the museum’s inclined safety. “It’s chaos down right here,” he told the newspaper. In 2021, he modified into as soon as made appearing keeper for the Greek and Roman collections, though he did now not quit up getting the everlasting job; other recent duties incorporated curating one amongst the museum’s touring exhibitions, “Aged Greeks: Athletes, Warriors and Heroes,” which travelled to Australia in 2021 and later to the Suzhou Museum, in China.

Per the recent civil submitting, Higgs has “indicated that he intends to dispute the Claim but his Defence provides no particulars of that denial.” No formal costs have yet been introduced in opposition to him. He did now not resolution my requests to consult with him. The submitting means that he has been unable to respond successfully to the proceedings thanks to “severe mental force.”

But in December, 2021, to promote the “Aged Greeks” exhibition, he gave a active interview to the Sydney Morning Heraldby which he recounted that his formative exposure to the arts of antiquity had been thru a mountainous-uncle who ran a fish-and-chips shop within the North of England, and whose backyard featured a marble reproduction of the Laocoön. Now within the Vatican Museums, the Laocoön is basically the most infamous sculpture of antiquity, showing the priest of Apollo and his two sons struggling with a pair of flesh-drinking snakes. Higgs mentioned of the reproduction, “I climbed within the route of it, and I fully loved it. And it need to have gotten into my head.” One of his favourite objects within the “Aged Greeks” designate, Higgs published, modified into as soon as an exquisitely engraved chalcedony gem, barely the dimensions of a postage trace. It depicted Nike, the goddess of battle, her draperies falling off her body as she piles up hands and armor seized in fight. Higgs told the paper that the gem, which modified into as soon as bought by the British Museum in 1865, is “one amongst the absolute top examples that I’ve viewed on the planet.” It’s miles additionally the form of element that Charles Townley would have happy in.

Slow final year, the annual dinner of the trustees of the British Museum modified into as soon as held, for the first time in someone’s memory, within the Duveen Gallery, where the Parthenon sculptures are displayed. Tables had been laid out for prosperous donors and neatly-known online page visitors from the worlds of politics and culture. In a speech, Osborne made forthright reference to his negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister, and to his hope for an “settlement that enables these mountainous sculptures to be viewed in Athens as successfully as London.” Osborne additionally spoke of the thefts. “We are able to’t pretend it didn’t occur, or it doesn’t matter, or that some years within the past we weren’t warned,” he mentioned. “It modified into as soon as our responsibility to position a question to after these objects, and we failed in that responsibility.”

In unhurried July, shortly before the final public revelation of the thefts, the museum had launched that Hartwig Fischer would possibly likely maybe be ending his length of time as director in 2024, but would dwell within the job while the save a question to a successor modified into as soon as beneath formulation. A month later, within the wake of revelations of the museum’s failure to brand Gradel’s warning, Fischer tendered his rapid resignation. “The responsibility for that failure must in a roundabout procedure leisure with the director,” Fischer mentioned. He lately despatched me this commentary: “The functioning of a museum requires the probity of its workers. That any member of workers would breach this rule, hold, and damage a public appropriate, is gorgeous.” The museum, he neatly-known, “is an organisation with a deep sense of responsibility for the artefacts in its custody. Clearly, it modified into as soon as upsetting for all to position a question to this abused by a particular person whom we trusted.”

In mid-December the museum published an story of the findings of an inner evaluate, which launched the forthcoming documentation and digitization of the total series, in teach to “put off any pockets of unregistered objects.” (About half of of the series has been completely digitized thus far.) The remark additionally provided a few sketchy most necessary parts concerning the continuing quest to get what had been lost, revealing that, of the two thousand or so missing or damaged objects, most efficient about three hundred and fifty needed to this level been recovered—the majority of them with the support of Gradel. Jonathan Williams, the deputy director who had brushed Gradel off when he first raised alarms, resigned at the quit of the year. In March, Nicholas Cullinan, the head of the Nationwide Portrait Gallery, who has been grand praised for the renovation of that institution, modified into as soon as named as Fischer’s replace. He’ll take up the submit this summer.

For some people associated with the British Museum, the recent tumult made the simpler questions of motive that hallowed museums are facing most efficient more pressing. Mary Beard, speaking in her private capacity, rather then as a trustee of the museum, told me, “You must mediate, How will we half, and ought to we’d like to half, the heritage of world culture? And how will we half it exterior of the inclined hubs of cultural possession: Western European capitals and the locations where objects got right here from?” Museums ought to be focused on what they’re going to position a question to esteem fifty yea rs or a hundred years from now, Beard went on. “With one thing esteem the Parthenon marbles—that is Beard story, but I esteem the premise of them going to Mumbai or Auckland,” she mentioned. “What’s going to we imply when we talk of our ‘shared heritage of Hellenism’? It goes far previous London, Paris, Contemporary York, and Athens.”

No new trends within the Parthenon-marbles discussions were reported in recent months. Lord Vaizey told me, “Sadly, standing on high of a stepladder to commerce a delicate bulb and level-headed being a foot away from the socket—to commerce the sunshine bulb is impossible.” Nevertheless, the probability of the marbles making a return of some sort to Athens appears likelier than it has for two hundred years. Fair lately, the Metropolitan Museum has positioned on point out, for finally the subsequent decade, an present of Cycladic objects privately mute by the American businessman Leonard Stern. A world deal modified into as soon as struck to book clear of that you just would possibly additionally focal level on appropriate challenges to the series’s provenance. The wall text of the set up, which modified into as soon as arranged in settlement with the Museum of Cycladic Art, in Athens, and with the Greek authorities, notes that the entire lot on point out is now regarded as the property of Greece. Prime Minister Mitsotakis heralded the negotiations, which took situation over two years, as a paradigm for facing contentious complications with patrimony. “On condition that the evidentiary procedures for any judicial assert around cultural property is normally very now not easy, costly, and cumbersome, a more pragmatic arrive is incessantly the more good arrive,” he mentioned. In November, the beleaguered British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak huffily cancelled a gathering with Mitsotakis after his Greek counterpart told an interviewer that dividing the Parthenon Sculptures modified into as soon as esteem slicing the Mona Lisa in half of. No matter this, Mitsotakis later mentioned, “I believe each and each occasions have the imaginative and prescient to position a question to previous previous division to include a new gain-gain period of partnership.”

For the time being, a customer to the British Museum can level-headed gaze the Parthenon Sculptures—likely after weaving thru the Greek and Roman galleries, where some years within the past an awkward waiter at a arrangement unintentionally knocked a thumb off the hand of Charles Townley’s scantily clad Venus. Or you can discover a detour thru the thematic Enlightenment Gallery, where Townley’s discobolus is displayed now not removed from the seductive Clytie, who stands on a pedestal a few feet from a bust of Townley himself, making an are trying rushing in an start-necked ruffled shirt. Till June, a customer would possibly likely dip accurate into a room near the museum’s entrance to talk over with a dinky exhibition titled “Rediscovering Gemstones,” which showcases a handful of the glass gem stones that Higgs allegedly stole from the Townley series, along with other cameos and intaglios that illustrate why these lengthy-overpassed objects exerted this kind of fascination at some level of the period of the museum’s founding.

I ended by the exhibition lately, and observed that one amongst Townley’s desktop cupboards modified into as soon as on point out. Diverse of its drawers had been start to show cloak rows of lozenge-formed glass gem stones in shades of blue and crimson, alternating with casts in shades of crimson and red, all ringed with gold-coloured bands. They regarded engrossing and nearly fit to be eaten, esteem the wares of a high-quit confectionery shop. In a backlit case, ten of the recovered gem stones had been displayed, none bigger than a fingernail. I squinted at them thru a magnifying glass. There modified into as soon as a tumbler cameo of a paunchy-cheeked Cupid, from which phase of a flee had broken off, and a tumbler intaglio that showed Jupiter within the make of an eagle abducting Ganymede; described in a designate as a “waster,” it modified into as soon as a exiguous miscast, and had been discarded as trash by its antique maker. These had been rarely the absolute top products of antiquity, and beneath standard conditions would by no arrive were in a British Museum point out cabinet. A placard outlined their abnormal direction to prominence. It modified into as soon as placing to focal level on how grand anxiousness had been caused by such exiguous objects, and about how deceptively inconsequential they would possibly likely as soon as have gave the impact, lying hidden away within the museum’s solid rooms of their multitudinous quantity.

A varied case showed a few of Townley’s more illustrious gem stones—examples that had by no arrive long gone missing. One modified into as soon as a fraction of what had in antiquity been a grand better cameo of a female decide in profile. The fragment modified into as soon as carved from onyx marked with bands that its creator had cunningly incorporated into the rendering of the field’s hair. It modified into as soon as magnificent and mysterious, and the undeniable fact that it had been save of abode in gold indicated that its eighteenth-century proprietor had procedure so, too. I remembered one thing Gradel had told me the final time we spoke: that among the many objects he had provided, or regarded as procuring, which he now suspected got right here from the Townley series had been two very elegant gem fragments that, on examination, he had sure to be eighteenth-century fakes. Gradel then neatly-known that Townley, unlike most aristocratic collectors—who craved the biggest and most efficient and most intact gem stones—had a taste for fragments. “These two fragments had been clearly intended to deceive,” Gradel went on. “In usual industrial terms, it didn’t discover sense to discover them. It most efficient is difficult in case you specialize in that they had been made for one remark client who modified into as soon as identified to cherish and cherish fragments—namely, Charles Townley.”

Gradel revered this aspect of Townley’s connoisseurship, he went on, on story of he shared it. “I genuinely settle on a fraction to an total gem,” he told me. “With total pieces that you just would possibly successfully be told the entire lot, and it’s too easy. Whereas in case you most efficient have a exiguous fragment, it’s esteem doing a crossword puzzle. You must argue, to research, and to reconstruct the total object.” To have most efficient a exiguous sliver of evidence from which to decide out your total story, Gradel concluded, modified into as soon as “a powerful intellectual assert.” ♦