Prior to the nineteenth century, western Europe had little exposure to sculpture from the classical Greek period. Then, in 1799, Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, was appointed Britain’s ambassador to Turkey. Lord Elgin (the “g” is hard) was an avid art collector as well as a diplomat, and he soon engineered a controversial acquisition that would allow the western continent to bear witness to the beauty of classical Greek sculpture.

At the time of Elgin’s appointment, Greece was under Turkish domination and in conflict with the Turkish empire. The ongoing conflict, and the acts of vandals, threatened the Greek antiquities that decorated the Parthenon, a majestic shrine on the Acropolis that had overlooked Athens for twenty-four centuries. Elgin persuaded the Turkish government to allow him to remove from Greece the majority of the sculptural decoration. He shipped the collection to London over several years at his own expense, reputedly more than 50,000 pounds.

The removal of the Greek antiquities sparked a heated controversy; the poet Lord Byron denounced Elgin as a “plunderer.” A parliamentary committee exonerated Elgin, however, and Elgin negotiated Britain’s ultimate purchase of the sculptures in 1816 for 35,000 pounds. The antiquities, now known as the Elgin Marbles, were placed in the British Museum, where they remain today.

PostScript: While Byron castigated Elgin, John Keats, in his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sculptures. Although critics at the time largely condemned the Marbles as crude, the view that they indeed were of great artistic importance ultimately prevailed.