Field Notes

Skinned Alive!

After 60 Years, Damage Caused by British Museum Restorers to the Elgin Marbles is Finally Made Public

In early June, Britain’s culture secretary, Chris Smith, appeared before Parliament to answer questions about the Elgin Marbles, the 2,500-year-old sculptures removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin and acquired by the British Museum in 1816 (see Jacob Rothenberg, “Lord Elgin’s Marbles,” AO 01:02).

“They have been kept in very good condition,” Smith said of the marbles carved under the direction of the master sculptor Phidias. “Very great care has been taken of them ever since [their acquisition].”

But just a week after Smith’s testimony, Oxford University Press published a revised edition of the classic study Lord Elgin and His Marbles, by historian William St. Clair. Citing a 1939 British Museum internal report, previously suppressed by museum officials, St. Clair reports that between 1938 and 1939 museum curators botched an attempt to clean a number of the marbles by scrubbing the sculptures with abrasive copper scrapers. Not only were the marbles’ surfaces damaged, but the tool marks of Phidias’s crew and patches of fifth-century B.C. paint—the marbles were originally painted—were obliterated.