Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Archeology
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, archeology was a very
hit-and-miss, treasure-hunting affair. The early students of antiquity went to
Greece to draw and make plaster casts of the great masterpieces of Classical
sculpture. Unfortunately, a number soon found it more convenient or more
profitable to remove objects wholesale and might be better described as
looters than scholars or archeologists.
Early excavations
he
British Society of Dilettanti
was one of the earliest promoters of Greek culture,
financing expeditions to draw and publish antiquities. Founded in the 1730s as a
reputedly drunken club for young aristocrats who had completed the Grand Tour
(among them Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the Hellfire Club), the society was the
first body organized to sponsor systematic research into Greek antiquities, though it
was initially most interested in Italy, as Greece was then still a backwater of the
Ottoman Empire.
One of the first expeditions sponsored by the society was that of two young artists,
James Stuart
and
Nicholas Revett
, who spent three years in Greece, principally in
and around Athens, drawing and measuring the antiquities. The publication of their
exquisite illustrations and the 1764 publication of
Johann Winckelmann
's
History of
Art
, in which the
Parthenon
and its sculptures were exalted as the standard for
architectural beauty, gave an enormous boost to the study (and popularity) of all
things Greek; many European Neoclassical town and country houses date from
this period.
The Dilettanti financed a number of further expeditions to study Greek antiquities,
including one to Asia Minor in 1812. While waiting in Athens for a ship to Turkey, the
party employed themselves in excavations at
Eleusis
, where they uncovered the
Temple
of Demeter
. After extensive explorations in Asia Minor, the participants returned via
Attica, where they excavated the
Temple of Nemesis
at
Rhamnous
and examined the
Temple of Poseidon
at
Soúnio
.
Pilfering and preservation
Several other antiquarians of the age were less interested in discoveries for their own
sake. A French count,
Choiseul-Gouffier,
, removed part of the
Parthenon frieze
in 1787
and his example prompted
Lord Elgin
to detach much of the rest in 1801. These were
essentially acts of looting - “Bonaparte has not got such things from all his thefts in
Italy”, boasted Elgin - and their legality was suspect even at the time.
Other discoveries of the period were more ambiguous. In 1811, a party of English
and German travellers, including the architect
C. R. Cockerell
, uncovered the
Temple of
Aphaea
on
Égina
and shipped away the pediments. They auctioned off the marbles for
£6000 to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, and, inspired by this success, returned to Greece
for further finds. This time they struck it lucky with 23 slabs from the
Temple of Apollo
Epikourios
at
Bassae
, for which the British Museum laid out a further £15,000. These
were huge sums for the time and highly profitable exercises, but they were also
pioneering archeology for the period. Besides, removing the finds was hardly
surprising: Greece, after all, was not yet a state and had no public museum, so
antiquities discovered were invariably sold by their finders.
