Looting Matters: The New Acropolis Museum Opens in Athens, Greece
SWANSEA, Wales, June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- David Gill, archaeologist, considers the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece.
The New Acropolis Museum will open in Athens on Saturday June 20, 2009. The building, designed by Bernard Tschumi Architects, is located to the south of the Acropolis. It allows visitors to the archaeological sites in the heart of the ancient city to see the sculptures, inscriptions and other objects in close proximity to where they were found.
Highlights of the displays will include the sixth and early fifth century sculptures that still show traces of their vivid colors. Female statues have lavishly patterned clothing. This decoration appears to have been preserved when the dedications were buried after the Persian sack of the Acropolis in the fall of 480 BCE.
The museum opening is re-igniting the long-running dispute over the sculptures once displayed on the Parthenon, the main temple of Athena on the Acropolis dating to the second half of the fifth century BCE. In the early nineteenth century the Seventh Earl of Elgin removed parts of the continuous frieze that ran round the inner part of the temple. The British Government subsequently purchased these marble slabs along with other parts of the architectural sculptures: the pediments (displayed at either end of the building with the Birth of Athena, and Athena's fight with Poseidon) and the metopes (relief sculptures showing, for example, battles between the Greek gods and the giants, as well as the Greeks and the Amazons). These "Elgin marbles" are now displayed in the British Museum in London.
The upper gallery of the New Acropolis Museum makes a visual link with the Parthenon itself. Small sculptural fragments from the Parthenon have been returned from Palermo in Sicily and the Vatican collections. Has the time come to reunite the remaining sculptures in this flagship archaeological museum?
