BRITISH MUSEUM, Parthenon Marble Introduction

The rectangular hall you now stand in was specifically designed to display the museum's most important and controversial group of classical statues: the "Elgin Marbles", which are the statues and reliefs Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon of Athens in 1801.

At that time Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the British Ambassador to Istanbul Lord Elgin cleverly managed to negotiate the purchase of Phidias' extraordinary Parthenon sculptures, which had been damaged by Venetian naval bombardment at the end of the seventeenth century. After the fall of Napoleon, the marbles were transported to London and the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova was brought to England to examine and possibly restore them; he refused to restore the missing parts, exclaiming: "This isn't marble, it's flesh!"...