ONE of the British Museum’s most oft-cited reasons for keeping the stolen Parthenon Marbles since 1816 ... saving them from pollution ... has been undercut by an analysis claiming they have been damaged by cleaning methods and chipped at by vandals.
The marbles were ripped off the edifice of the Parthenon by a Scottish diplomat, Lord Elgin ... who said he took them with permission of officials from the occupying Ottoman Empire, who didn’t own them.
Victorian-era "vandals" had chipped away at the faces of the sculptures and deliberately left chisel marks, Emma Payne, a specialist in classics and archaeological conservation based at King's College London, discovered, said INews.
She defended the theft as necessary to ultimately protect the sculptures ... not mentioning that the Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 with a top floor designed to show them off if returned, under the Acropolis.
"The obvious conclusion to draw is there was a period of particularly rapid deterioration between 1802 and 1872," she wrote.
And a second set of casts, commissioned by the British Museum in 1872, found more likely damage caused in the previous 70 years than the next 120.
The study, published in Antiquity magazine, meant that more than a century of Greek traffic pollution had actually caused less harm than the Victorian "vandals" who damaged them, although it wasn't described why or how.
"It is noteworthy that the decay of the sculptures appears to have slowed during the 20th Century precisely when problems with sulfurous emissions and acid rain were most acute," said Payne.
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