Romantic Circles Blog

The New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece

Britain and Greece have marked their roughly two hundred-year stalemate surrounding the ownership of the Elgin Marbles with a new salvo. The occassion: the June 20 opening of the new $200 million, 260,000 square foot Acropolis Museum in Athens. The museum’s opening can be seen as a rebuttal to claims by the British Museum, which holds more than half of the frieze’s total length, that Greece did not have a sufficient space to keep them. Indeed, Claire Soares of  The Independent sees this massive undertaking as a very deliberate demonstration of Greece’s ability to keep the frieze safe:  “Unlike any other museum in the world, it was designed to house something it didn’t own.”

The gaps in the Greek collection are completed with plaster casts of the originals, made to look by some reports conspicuous in their artificiality. As Sean Newsom of The Times of London argued recently , “We can argue all we like about how we saved the sculpture from years of turmoil in Greece, but with this room finally completed, it’s obvious where they now belong.”

Though no permanent loan requests or bequeathals seem to be in the offing, Greek officials have taken on a triumphal tone. The inevitable, it seems, has finally come, according to Greek Culture Minister Antonio Samaras: “For 200 years, the Parthenon Marbles have been amputated, now they must be reunited. The Parthenon frieze speaks through its totality; this voice should be heard not be silenced,”

Numerous other commentators have chimed in on Greece’s behalf–among them Christopher Hitchens and Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times. Compare these with responses from the Romantic period by Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, among others. The striking thing, even with the opening of the new museum, is how little the debate has changed.

The holdings of the Parthenon Frieze at the Acropolis Museum. Currently, the British Museum holds roughly 60 percent of the total length compared to the Acropolis Museum's 40 percent

Another exhibition, this time at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, chronicles one hundred years (1730-1830) of “intimate portraits,” including portraits of Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

This exhibition explores a fascinating but relatively unknown type of portraiture that flourished in Georgian and Regency Britain between the 1730s and 1830s.

It features intimate portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, John Downman, Richard Cosway, David Wilkie and many others, all drawn from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum, many never exhibited before.

Portraits were displayed in public at the Royal Academy exhibitions but behind the scenes, in private sitting rooms, studies and bedrooms some of them served a more intimate role. Miniatures were often worn as jewellery to keep a loved one close; fragile pastels protected by glittering gilt frames were displayed on walls, while drawings were framed or mounted in albums to be shown to friends and family.

The exhibition features nearly 200 examples in a range of materials, from pencil, chalk, watercolours and pastels to miniatures on ivory. It includes many self-portraits as well as intimate portraits of the artists’ families and friends. Sitters vary from the merchant and middle classes to the aristocracy, actors and celebrities including Lady Hamilton, and political and literary figures such as Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Burns and the young Queen Victoria.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery
25 October – 1 February 2009

British Museum
Prints and Drawings Gallery, Room 90
5 March – 31 May 2009

Here’s what the British Museum has to say about an ongoing exhibition on currency and the industrial revolution: