Somewhere in a workshop in Tuscany, a robot is currently doing the work of the 5th-century BC sculptor, painter, and architect, Phidias. The 3D device is painstakingly recreating each carve, chisel, and curve of one of the sculptures of the Parthenon Marbles — the marbles that used to adorn the Temple of the Acropolis in Athens, before being removed to Britain by Lord Elgin between 1801 and 1812.
The robot is working at the behest of the Oxford-based research group, The Institute of Digital Archaeology — the team that, in 2016, created a 20-foot-tall replica of Syria’s Arch of Triumph, after it was destroyed by Isis terrorism in the ancient city of Palmyra. Last year, they took the reconstructive powers of technology one step further when they brought John Keats back to life, just in time for the bicentenary of his death. The necromancy was made complete by a reconstruction of Keats’s distinctive “cockney” voice — which you can hear in a CGI reading of his poem “Bright Star”.
However disconcerting this CGI-Keats might be, the Institute of Digital Archaeology’s most recent project has rather higher stakes. By copying the marbles, the Institute’s director, Roger Michel, hopes to create replicas which are “visually indistinguishable” from the sculptures and frieze housed in the British Museum. The team has even managed to source Pentelic marble — the same stone used by the Greeks back in the 5th century BC — to make these sculptures “exact duplicates”.
Michel’s intentions for these copies are not unambitious. After creating two prototypes, he wants to recreate the marbles Lord Elgin took from Greece in their entirety. These replicas will, in the Institute’s ideal world, replace the marbles in the British Museum so that the originals can be repatriated to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
The idea has gained traction rapidly. The Times ran an editorial in favour of the swap, while The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins dismissed the views of “snooty art critics” who would damn the replicas as “fakes”. As for the Greeks, they have, understandably, latched onto it as a solution which could see the British Museum returning the marbles with as little fuss as possible.
But as with all things to do with the Parthenon Marbles, this is unlikely to be as simple as it might appear. Ignoring the fact that the British Museum’s position is still very much anti-repatriation — and, indeed, anti-reproduction: Michel had to resort to “guerrilla tactics” in order to scan the marbles for the 3D machining device, after the museum denied his request — there are difficulties in the nature of the replicas themselves: they could turn out to be better than those currently on display.
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