Talk:1937–1938 Elgin Marbles cleaning scandal: Difference between revisions

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@UndercoverClassicist: As I said on my talk page, I think the article in its current state is excellent, but I do have a few comments and questions about the illustrations and their captions:

• I see no brush in the photo of the tools, which makes the reference to “the brush” in the caption confusing. The brush is mentioned in the text, which is enough; I’m not sure it needs to be mentioned in the caption as well, especially since it does not appear in the photo. (It does appear in the photo of the tools in Jenkins 2001, p. 24, pl. 10; were you thinking of this one instead?) Also, when I click on the link to the source (Oddy) on the file description page for this image, I get a “page not found” error.
• The head of the horse of Selene, discovered in the process of cleaning in 1938: to me, this makes it sound as if the head had been lost in the storerooms for decades, and then was rediscovered while the cleaning campaign was under way. From elsewhere in the text I gather that this was simply one of the pieces that Hinks and Forsdyke saw being cleaned when they came down to the dungeons to investigate the screaming, but that is not (to me) the most natural way to understand the words.
• The caption of the photo of block XXIV of the north frieze states that this block was cleaned in 1937–1938, and that a small amount of patina is visible on the left edge. The source cited is Jenkins 2001, pp. 28 and 30. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I don’t see any reference to this particular block on those pages. I see the brownish patch in the photo, of course, but without a source to confirm what it is, wouldn’t it be WP:SYNTH to declare that the stain is the patina referred to elswhere in the article and not, say, some other discoloration peculiar to this particular block? And if this block was cleaned in the 30s, why did they leave this one small patch uncleaned? It’s a different situation from the uncleaned lower corner of block XXXIX, which is illustrated earlier in the article. (I haven’t seen Boardman 2000, which is cited in the caption of that photo, but I assume that he discusses this specifically.)
  • Yes, Boardman does. I was going with “stating the bloody obvious” for the comment about patina, especially as the general view seems to be to use “patina” for any surface colouration (accepting that some might be discoloured varnish, some might be rust, some might be lichen, but it’s all valuable historical and possibly aesthetic material). I’ve changed to “colouration”: I suppose we could just remove. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:13, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • I guess it’s not so obvious to me what exactly that stain is, and whether it has anything to do with the cleaning in the 1930s. If you spend much time looking at ancient sculpture, you will see all kinds of discoloration caused by all kinds of circumstances. If this block was cleaned in the 30s and yet this stain was left, perhaps it’s because it was not the same kind of surface patina (well illustrated in the third image in the article, on the side of the group of two goddesses (E and F) from the east pediment) that was scraped away elsewhere, but rather something that would have required the cleaners to dig more deeply to remove it. Jenkins does in fact discuss this block, not on pp. 28 and 30, but on p. 24, with pl. 11 on p. 25. He describes the “buffing” of the damaged area on the foreground horse, which resulted in “a slight blunting of the pitting and a blurring of the contour edges”, but says nothing about the stain. I wouldn’t want to say any more myself without looking at the block in person, and I think it’s probably not wise for either of us to declare that we know what it is, or what its relationship is to the cleaning that took place in the 30s, unless a source says something about it. Since Jenkins explicitly states that the damaged area on the horse’s haunch has been smoothed, perhaps it would be better for the caption to emphasize that instead of the discoloration? It’s relevant to the subject of the article, and unlike the stain, it is actually mentioned in the source. Choliamb (talk) 15:57, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      Now adjusted following your suggestions. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:19, 21 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• The caption of the photo of figure G from the east pediment says that the lower parts were cleaned and the upper parts were not. This surprised me, because the drapery around the lower legs seems, at least in this photo, to have a yellowish-brown tinge, and readers have been trained by the text and by other photos earlier in the article to equate this color with the patina of the uncleaned parts of the sculptures. I checked Cook’s description, quoted in Jenkins, expecting to find that it was the other way around, and that what he actually said was that the upper parts had been cleaned and the lower parts not. But no, his comment has been correctly reported. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to see what he says he sees, however. He specifies that “the line of demarcation is readily visible about half-way up the thighs”, and if I view the photo at full resolution, I think maybe I can see a line on the right thigh separating a slightly brighter area below and a dingier area above. Maybe. Presumably it is much clearer in person, but it’s not at all easy to make out in the photo, and I think the general reader who doesn’t know that they’re supposed to look at this one specific spot on the thigh, and instead simply compares the (apparently) whiter breast of the figure with the (apparently) yellower legs is going to end up mystified, or draw the wrong conclusion, as I did. I’m not sure what the best solution is here.
  • I haven’t seen the marbles since finding out the details of this, but I think that may well be the point — people at the time were pointing to lots of examples of “damage”, but were often pointing to different sculptures, not all of which had actually been cleaned! As far as I can tell there’s no specific example that people on both sides of the trench warfare around this issue agrees can visibly show the effect of what happened in the 1930s. Part of me wonders whether “the damage is obvious to a trained eye” was sometimes the equivalent of “obviously I am clever enough to see the emperor’s lovely coat“. Fig. G is discussed a lot in the sources and the article, so I think it’s worth having here. When I’m next at the BM I’ll see if I can find and photograph the line Cook mentioned. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:13, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I noticed, looking again at this group photo, that the line seems to be clearer there and in the right direction (the lower part of Figure G, at far right, looks lighter). It’s just about equally visible on this one. However, neither is a great picture of Figure G as a whole: not sure if a crop would be useful, perhaps displayed alongside the one we have? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 14:35, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, G should certainly be illustrated; I wasn’t suggesting that it be removed, only that the caption be tweaked to be more helpful to readers who are trying to see the reported difference in appearance. In addition to the two photos you mention, the line on the thigh is also more clearly visible in Jenkins, p. 25, pl. 14, even at the low resolution of the open access-web version of his report. I wonder if a photo with an added arrow to guide the reader’s attention to the line would be possible solution. In any case, this seems to be what you are looking for: a specific example in which both sides agree about the visible effects of the cleaning. (Jenkins calls it “the best of all examples”, but of course one reason why he likes it is because he thinks it shows that the damage was not significant.) Some of Jenkins’s other photos also seem fairly clear, like the back of the horse’s head in plate 16, although there it’s hard to tell how much of the softness in the more recent picture is due to the “rubbing” and how much is due to the difference in lighting between it and the 19th-century photo. Choliamb (talk) 15:57, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

ETA: I did a quick version of a crop with an arrow here; see what you think. Choliamb (talk) 16:25, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good image: I initially drafted it with a multi-image template, but when we put your one in, the “original” no longer adds a whole lot of value, so I’ve just made a straightforward swap. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:00, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Is there some specific reason for including the photo of south metope 27? Yes, it’s the most beautiful and the most famous of the metopes, and if you’re going to pick one, it’s the obvous choice. But what is the relevance to this article? Was this metope one of the ones cleaned? The article quotes Cook as saying that “the difference is obvious” to a trained eye between the metopes that were cleaned and those that were not. Is this one of the former or one of the latter? If the photo has no specific purpose, then rather than eliminating it entirely, perhaps it could be moved up and used it in the lead image of the article, which is a compound image illustrating the different parts of the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. I’d be happy to see it replace the metope that is currently part of that image, which is one of the ugliest and most ungainly of all the surviving metopes.
  • From what I can tell, all of the metopes were cleaned (or at least are equally suspected of being cleaned) — I had slightly misrepresented Cook (the difference he pointed to was between parts of the frieze). The 60% figure represents that they cleaned parts of each sculpture (generally the background) and left an average of 40% untouched. It’s not doing anything particular except filling a space where a picture of some kind seems beneficial, so I wouldn’t have any major objection to swapping it with the one in the lead image. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:13, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • When I went back to see what, if anything, Jenkins says about frieze block XXIV, I noticed that he also has a few words about this metope (p. 24, with pl. 12 on p. 25). It’s easy to overlook, since the photo is of a very small detail, and you have to know in advance that this is metope 27 in order to make the connection. You can read his comments for yourself, but he concludes that, in this case, “there is very little, if any rubbing” of the stone and “not even the background is seriously affected, as in the case of the other metopes.” In light of that, I’m now in favor of leaving this image in the article and expanding the caption to say that it’s an example of a metope that appears to have been largely unaffected by the cleaning, or something along those lines. Choliamb (talk) 15:57, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      Done something to this effect. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:19, 21 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Finally, for a little more context, I wonder if it might be helpful to add a few sentences about the fact that similar techniques were used by the American excavators in the Athenian Agora to clean the sculptures of the Hephaisteion as late as the 1950s, as Jenkins points out. One would think, or at least hope, that Homer Thompson would know better by then, but neither he nor anyone else at the Agora seems to have had any qualms. (According to Jenkins the process was actually supervised by our friend Alison Franz, which I never knew, or had forgotten.) Jenkins has a point when he calls attention to the double standard: scandal at the BM, while nobody bats an eye in the Agora. Whataboutism is no defense, of course: the Parthenon marbles have always been a special case, the damage was real, and the BM would have less egg on its face if it hadn’t relied so heavily on the sanctimonious “good steward” argument to defend its claim to them, and then tried so hard to cover up what it had done. Still, the Hephaisteion cleaning is useful parallel, and the contrast in the reactions, then and now, says something about the political dimensions of affair. Choliamb (talk) 03:21, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I’ll think about this. Jenkins and Boardman make much of it, but their argument is pretty nakedly whataboutism — though it’s interesting and maybe germane that Plenderleith advised on it and didn’t raise any objections to the use of tools. The Hephaisteion cleaning was many years later, in Greece, with the consent of the Greek authorities — there are lots of reasons why it’s not an obvious comparandum except to make the sort of point that Jenkins wishes to (“everyone else was doing it, so what’s the big deal?”). However, the Jenkins argument is undercut somewhat by the fact that using copper tools clearly was considered unusual and obviously shocking in the 1930s BM context — as we can see from the reliable stream of complaints whenever the BM previously tried to use much less aggressive measures, and the fact that nobody in the museum ever tried to defend the practice (well, except Holcombe). I’m also not sure whether the Hephaisteion cleaning can be shown to be typical of the time; if it can, that would be more obviously relevant. Where would you think of putting this? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 07:13, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I understand what you say, but the fact that it did happen in Greece and with the knowledge and approval of the Greek authorities is part of why it seems to me such an interesting comparandum. Comparanda don’t have to be close parallels; they can illuminate by contrast as well. Jenkins and Boardman are definitely claiming WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS as a way of deflecting from the BM’s own culpability, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a brief mention here, at least as a point raised by one side in the debate over the severity of the damage. But I don’t feel strongly about it, and I haven’t really thought about where to put it, so I’ll leave it up to you. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 15:57, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    I think it’s worth footnoting on the section where people suggest that it was the coverup, not the crime, that made this a scandal — I’ll have a think about how to craft it without either SYNTHing or making the same sort of not-entirely-good-faith argument Jenkins does. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:45, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    I’ve now had a go at something to this effect. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:18, 21 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have read through the end of the Background section and found it fine as it is. I do have a few minor suggestions, however:

Lead

‎*”and had been purchased by the museum from Lord Elgin” →”and had been purchased from Lord Elgin”
‎*”Joseph Duveen, a wealthy businessman and art collector” →”Joseph Duveen, a businessman and art collector”

• • Since you describe him simply as a “businessman and art dealer” in the body and this is the only mention of the adjective “wealthy”.

Background

• How about briefly introducing “Westmacott” by his occupation as done for the others? I leave it to you, if required.

MSincccc (talk) 17:30, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve gone the other way on Duveen — he was very wealthy, and his wealth was a major source of his power over the BM’s staff, so I’ve added “wealthy” to the body. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:47, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your response. A few further suggestions after reading the article through to the end of the British Museum investigation section:

• There are five instances of “enquiry” and three of “inquiry”, all referring to the same investigation. Would it be possible to standardise the usage throughout?
• The sculptures came originally from the fifth-century BCE Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens and had been purchased by the museum from Lord Elgin in 1816. Would it be safe to drop “by the museum” here, as the buyer is already clear from the context?

MSincccc (talk) 05:06, 19 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

“Board of inquiry” is a fixed phrase, even in BrE, where the usual spelling of that last word is “enquiry”. It does look odd to use both, but it’s correct. I’ve swapped out a few “enquiry”s for alternatives to reduce the awkwardness. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 08:13, 19 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have read up to the end of the Estimates of damage subsection and have one further point:

On Figure G, Boardman considers that there is no discernable difference between the surface level of the cleaned and uncleaned parts,

Could “discernable” be replaced with “discernible”, which is the more common form in British English? MSincccc (talk) 18:29, 20 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve fixed this; it’s simply a typo. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:11, 21 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please tell me whether “Instituto Centrale del Restauro” and “Istituto Centrale per il Restauro” refer to the same organisation? I ask this because I could not find any mention of the former on the articles Cesare Brandi and Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro.

Rest assured, the article is fine as it is. Good luck with it in the future. MSincccc (talk) 10:35, 22 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that everyone agrees it was the ICR, but not what the little word between the C and the R was. Looking at the Italian Wiki page, that gives the original name as per il , but then cites a bunch of articles that almost universally use del. Istituto Centrale di Restauro, as we have on our page, is almost certainly wrong: you’d expect a definite article with the noun (so del). Looking on Google Books I’m inclined to say that Jenkins (and so this article) probably got it right. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 11:44, 22 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]