4 ms·

Vatican returns Parthenon sculptures to Greece in 'historic event'

• jfengel 4y ago
  That is rather a big deal. The British Museum receives all of the attention, but several museums have sculptures from the Parthenon, including the Louvre. The British Museum justly feels a bit put-upon by being the only one called on to return its pieces. It absolutely should: the Acropolis Museum in Athens is truly first-rate and is the best place to put those pieces in context. But this is a much bigger problem and the British Museum didn't want to risk being the only one. So having another major museum go first should be the nudge that the BM needs to return the marbles. And that's a cause for a major re-think of the British Museum, which was created not as an institution of learning but as a way to display the fruits of their empire. The empire is a history of their own, and worth having a museum about, but that's always going to be in conflict with the fact that they no longer have an empire and some of their former states deserve their own independent history.