In her article (The Parthenon marbles belong in Greece – so why is restitution so hard to swallow?, 5 February), Charlotte Higgins acknowledges that transferring the British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures to the Acropolis Museum in Athens “would not complete anything at all, since half of the stonework is destroyed, and they will never be intact again”, and that a former director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, had said in 2006 that “repatriation is yesterday’s question”. That view was right and remains so.
The Institute for Digital Archaeology’s offer to make marble facsimiles for the British Museum is shortsighted (Letters, 8 February). Facsimiles do indeed offer extraordinary cultural possibilities, but they should not be pressed as a stratagem in an already highly politicised restitution dispute.
It would be much more beneficial to make two sets of facsimiles of all the surviving Parthenon sculptures and install one on the Parthenon building itself and another in the Acropolis Museum in Athens (which was unwisely constructed on stilts above a major archaeological site in an earthquake zone).
Such a project would retain the inestimable benefits of large culturally comparative museums like the British Museum and the Louvre, and help deflate regressive nationalistic calls for a kind of cultural cleansing in which all works of art are returned to their (geographical) countries of origin.
Michael Daley
Director, ArtWatch UK
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