A Tourist in Athens, 1801

Extract

In the JHS xxxvi (1916) 162–372, Mr A. H. Smith gives a detailed account of the removal of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in 1801–5 and of their subsequent history; in his Lord Elgin and the Marbles (1967), Mr W. St Clair brings this account up-to-date. Both authors describe the happenings in Athens of the last week of July 1801, when Lord Elgin's secretary, the Revd Philip Hunt, was in Athens, when excavations began and when the first sculptures were removed from the fabric of the temple. There was also in Athens at that time a party of three young Englishmen, Messrs William Gell, Edward Dodwell and Atkins, and there is a contemporary account by Gell now available, which was not known either to Smith or to St Clair; it provides some further information as to the conditions under which Hunt had to work, and of the immediate emotions and reactions of the four Englishmen as they actually watched the first ‘Elgin marbles’ being removed, as distinct from their later sentiments—and from those of Lord Byron.

It will be remembered that, as he passed through Naples in October 1799, on his way to Constantinople, Lord Elgin had engaged a party of artists and stuccoists, under an Italian artist named Lusieri, but this party did not reach Athens till August 1800. When he visited Athens in the spring of 1801, Hunt found that they were making little progress in their principal task of drawing and modelling the sculptures of the buildings on the Acropolis, because of the obstructionism of the Turkish authorities, and he accordingly went back to Constantinople to obtain some imperial firman to allow the artists to continue with their work (St Clair, op. cit. 87).