Charles Townley, certainly one of Britain’s first nice collectors of antiquities, was born in Lancashire in 1737. A distaff descendant of the aristocratic Howard household, he was educated principally in France—a typical path for a well-born Catholic Englishman. Elegant and clever, Townley was, in keeping with an early biographical sketch, eagerly welcomed into Continental society, “from the dissipations of which it might be incorrect to say that he wholly escaped.” As a younger grownup, he returned to England and put in himself on the household property, having come right into a lavish inheritance. However earlier than lengthy he set off for Italy, in what can be the primary of three visits. In a dozen years, he amassed greater than 200 historic sculptures, together with different objects.
It was a very good second for a person of means to construct such a group. Many Italian nobles had been seeing their fortunes dwindle, and might be persuaded to half with inherited objects for the best value. In Naples, Townley purchased from the Principe di Laurenzano a Roman bust of a younger girl with downcast eyes, recognized because the nymph Clytie. (Later, Townley humorously referred to Clytie as his spouse, although he was not the marrying type.) Excavations had been then below method at Hadrian’s Villa, the retreat that the Emperor had constructed exterior Rome, and collectors raced to purchase artwork works as quickly as they had been faraway from the bottom. An élite seller named Thomas Jenkins, who saved a spot on the By way of del Corso for displaying historic wares, offered Townley, amongst different objects, a statue of a unadorned, muscled discus thrower. From the seventeen-eighties onward, Townley confirmed off his assortment in his London city home, close to St. James’s Park. A portray by Johan Zoffany, first exhibited below the title “A Nobleman’s Assortment,” depicts Townley and a number of other mates in a library full of dozens of marbles, together with a seven-foot Venus on a pedestal—her arm raised and her draperies lowered. Within the background are wood cupboards during which Townley presumably housed smaller treasures, together with numerous cameos and intaglios.
Townley’s museum was mentioned to rank under solely a handful of different personal collections in Europe in breadth and high quality. In accordance with Max Bryant, the creator of a 2017 monograph on Townley and his home, the gathering additionally mirrored “an eighteenth-century angle to artwork that itself has grow to be misplaced to modernity.” On the time, historic sculptures had been usually restored proper after being excavated—usually boldly. Students have concluded that Clytie’s bosom was enhanced to intensify the bust’s erotic cost; Townley’s discobolus, unearthed in a state of decapitation, was fitted with a head from a distinct sculpture.
In 1791, Townley was made a trustee of the British Museum. The primary nationwide public museum, it was established by an act of Parliament, in 1753, and was initially fashioned across the assortment of Hans Sloane, an Anglo-Irish doctor and businessman. When Townley died, in 1805, the museum acquired his sculptures for the then appreciable sum of twenty thousand kilos, and a gallery showcasing them opened three years later.
However Townley’s assortment was quickly decisively eclipsed. By 1810, aficionados of historic sculpture had begun clamoring to see a distinct cache of historic marbles, which was being housed in a shed in Mayfair. One younger artist, Benjamin Robert Haydon, wrote, of seeing the works, “I felt as if a divine reality had blazed inwardly upon my thoughts, and I knew that they’d ultimately rouse the artwork of Europe from its slumber within the darkness.” These sculptures got here not from Italy however from Ottoman-occupied Athens, the place they’d been pried from, or in any other case collected round, the ruins of the Parthenon, on the instruction of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin.
In 1799, Lord Elgin, a Scottish nobleman thirty-odd years Townley’s junior, arrived in Constantinople as Britain’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The challenge of eradicating the marbles from the Parthenon, the fifth-century temple on the Acropolis, and delivery them to Britain took greater than a decade—about half of the unique five-hundred-and-twenty-four-foot frieze was eliminated, as had been a lot of life-size statues from the pediments. Elgin initially meant to put in all of it at Broomhall, his ancestral house, northwest of Edinburgh. However he bumped into monetary difficulties, and in 1816 the Parthenon marbles, plus dozens of different sculptures from the Acropolis, had been acquired from Elgin by Parliament for the British Museum. The value, thirty-five thousand kilos, was set by comparability with the Townley assortment, however the esteemed sculptor Joseph Nollekens declared, “I reckon them very a lot greater than the Townley marbles for magnificence.”
The arrival in Britain of what grew to become referred to as the Elgin Marbles inspired an appreciation of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of the traditional Greeks over their later Roman copyists. The show of the marbles—ultimately, in a custom-built gallery significantly bigger than the one that includes Townley’s assortment—additionally helped set up the follow of leaving fragmentary statues unrestored. Though the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles was controversial from the beginning (Lord Byron decried their elimination from the Acropolis as vandalism), the sculptures’ significance was instantly acknowledged. They had been so prized, in actual fact, that quickly after Greece grew to become an unbiased state, in 1830, it demanded the statues again—a request that British diplomats have persistently rejected.
Over time, the popularity of Townley’s marbles steadily declined. The gallery devoted to his assortment was demolished in 1841, throughout an growth of the museum, and lots of sculptures that he’d acquired migrated to storerooms. Already hidden away had been the cameos, intaglios, and different small gadgets from his assortment, which had been acquired from his inheritor in 1814. Many of those objects had not been totally documented, and this meant that when a few of them began disappearing no one even seen that they had been gone.
Up to now yr or so, the British Museum has been wrestling—usually in public, and sometimes to its appreciable embarrassment—with what is likely to be characterised as the dual legacies of Townley and Elgin. In late 2022, studies emerged that the chair of the museum’s trustees, George Osborne, was in negotiations with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and {that a} deal is likely to be struck to permit the Parthenon Sculptures, as they’re now generally referred to as, to be despatched, in some vogue, to Greece. Many Britons have lengthy favored resolving the diplomatic stalemate; others branded the notion outrageous. Quickly after Osborne grew to become chair, a headline within the Day by day Specific warned, “don’t let british museum or elgin marbles be caught by woke ideology.” Not lengthy afterward, the museum was jolted by scandal when it was revealed that lots of of objects—together with cameos and intaglios as soon as owned by Townley—had been stolen, and a few of them offered off, over a interval of a few years, apparently by a member of the museum’s personal curatorial workers. The Day by day Mail contributed a usually lurid summation: “hunt for priceless gems stolen in netflix-style heist.”
The sensational headlines had been considerably deceptive: within the context of historic archeology, the time period “gem” usually refers to not diamonds or rubies however to engraved semiprecious stones or objects forged from glass. Enlightenment-era connoisseurs comparable to Townley generally purchased the much less helpful of those objects by the handful. (Cameos are carved in raised aid, intaglios in unfavorable aid.) Their historic homeowners prized them as miniature artistic endeavors. In accordance with Martin Henig, a senior tutorial customer on the College of Oxford’s Faculty of Archaeology, Roman emperors seem to have given cameos, which had been conveniently moveable, as tributes or presents to safe political alliances. Even fairly unusual folks may aspire to personal a glass gem, set in a signet ring, depicting a god or a mythological determine of non-public significance. A glass gem found at a Roman fortress close to the town of Oxford includes a horse and a cornet, suggesting that its proprietor was a horn-playing member of the cavalry. Henig informed me, “The most effective of the cameos, and one of the best of the intaglios, had been most likely way more extremely valued than sculptures,” which had been usually mass-produced in workshops. The designs of such artists as Dioskourides, a gem engraver who labored for Emperor Augustus, had been extraordinarily coveted. Right now, essentially the most prized gems can promote for lots of of 1000’s of {dollars}. For students, the significance of the gems lies not simply of their magnificence but in addition within the gentle their iconography sheds on historic issues and preoccupations.
The uproar over the Townley thefts and the controversy over the Elgin discussions imply that the British Museum has been within the headlines to an uncommon extent for a cultural establishment, even one which was final yr’s most visited vacationer attraction in London. But it surely was inevitable that the British Museum would grow to be the main target of scrutiny. The museum, a repository of greater than eight million artifacts from around the globe, most of them acquired throughout Britain’s reign as an imperial overlord, holds not simply classical sculptures but in addition Anglo-Saxon weapons, Chinese language ceramics, Assyrian wall panels, and the Rosetta Stone. Together with comparable establishments, such because the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, in New York, the British Museum has more and more confronted moral questions on the way it amassed its assortment. Along with being petitioned by the Greeks, the British Museum is being challenged for its holding of bronzes looted within the late nineteenth century by British forces from the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what’s now southern Nigeria. Restitution claims have additionally been made concerning sacred objects from Ethiopia.
The Townley thefts had been facilitated by the truth that curators had by no means absolutely recorded lots of the objects in inner catalogues or databases. Certainly, it was reported that particular person information for some 2.4 million gadgets on the British Museum had been missing, calling into query its long-standing, and generally arrogantly expressed, declare to be an unimpeachable custodian for susceptible artifacts. For some observers, it was an irresistible irony that precise thefts had occurred at an establishment lengthy accused of cultural theft. When a British TV channel requested viewers to contribute concepts for end-of-year jokes, the museum was the butt of the successful entry: “Did you hear in regards to the Christmas cake on show within the British Museum? It was Stollen.”
The British Museum has by no means been merely a trove of beautiful artwork works. It was additionally meant, by means of the depths of its holdings, to be an archive of the world—a library of issues. It was established by eighteenth-century polymaths as an expression of the Enlightenment conviction that common truths is likely to be arrived at by means of mental inquiry and scientific cause. The museum’s wildly disparate collections might by no means be compiled at the moment, which is each the establishment’s power and its level of weak spot. Why ought to the sarcophagi of Egyptian kings or the fragments of historic Greek structure be housed in London, and claimed in some sense as British? Townley, Elgin, and the opposite males whose acquisitions crammed the establishment’s galleries wouldn’t have considered such questions; at the moment they’re, rightly, unavoidable. At a sure level in a museum’s historical past, it turns into greater than only a repository of the cultural and creative previous, telling a narrative in regards to the historical past of a nation, or a folks, or the world. It additionally turns into a museum of itself—of its formation, its amassing historical past, its priorities, and its failings.
The British Museum’s painful self-examination may by no means have occurred had it not been for the persistence of Ittai Gradel, a Danish seller and collector of antiquities. Gradel doesn’t hunt for discoveries within the excavated ruins of palaces and temples, as his eighteenth-century predecessors did. As an alternative, he has usually sifted by means of that twenty-first-century web site of buried treasure—eBay. He has labored at universities in Denmark and within the U.Ok., and has a particular curiosity in historic cameos and intaglios. However he was not suited to tutorial life, seeing himself extra within the lineage of gentleman collectors who mixed scholarship and connoisseurship with the fun of discovery.
A number of years in the past, Gradel paid two thousand euros to a German public sale home for what was described on-line as a bunch of nineteenth- and twentieth-century cameos. He later confirmed what he had suspected instantly on analyzing {a photograph} of one of many items: it was an historic Roman cameo of Germanicus Caesar which Johann Winckelmann—the German scholar who is taken into account the daddy of Western artwork historical past—had described as one of many most interesting examples he’d ever seen. The cameo’s whereabouts had been unknown for greater than 200 years. Gradel informed me lately, “What I’m searching for is the errors, and the stupidity, of different sellers and public sale homes. That’s the place the bargains are.”
Greater than a dozen years in the past, Gradel was provided a reserve of glass and stone gems from one other seller. The objects purportedly got here from an property sale performed within the North of England within the early twentieth century. Between 2010 and 2013, Gradel purchased nearly 300 of them. He offered a couple of and saved the remaining. The gems had been of such high quality and amount that he assumed they had been a part of an outdated aristocratic assortment gathered on a Grand Tour; he had a hunch that they could have as soon as belonged to the Howard household, whose property, in North Yorkshire, is now recognized for its distinguished look within the 1981 adaptation of “Brideshead Revisited.” The household had offered some precious-stone gems to the British Museum within the Victorian period, and Gradel theorized that these much less helpful glass gems could have been offered off across the identical time. On the lookout for details about a potential Howard connection, he despatched inquiries to curators within the British Museum’s Division of Greece and Rome, however acquired no response. In the meantime, Gradel informed me, “increasingly of those gems saved turning up—the vender would say these had been the final, after which he would open one other drawer, and there have been some extra gems. I concluded, frankly, that he was aged and a bit dotty.” After 2011, the provision started to dwindle, and Gradel was knowledgeable that the vendor, whose identify was Paul Higgins, had died.
