Thinking about the Elgin Marbles:Critical Essays on Cultural Property, Art and Law PDF Download

Author: John Merryman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
This book begins with a critical reexamination of the rival Greek and British claims to the Elgin Marbles. That case study identifies the questions that still dominate the growing international debate about cultural property policy and are explored in subsequent essays: Why do people care about cultural property? Is cultural nationalism a sound organizing principle for dealing with cultural property questions? Or is it a relic of 19th century romanticism, kept alive by the power of Byron's poetry? How can cultural nationalism be rationalized with the idea that works of art and antiquities are 'the cultural heritage of all mankind?' What alternative ways are there of thinking about cultural property policy and law? The author examines in particular the law and policy relating to cultural property export controls and the evolution and development of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on the Return of Stolen and Illegally Exported Cultural Property. In the second part of the book the author addresses a number of contemporary art law issues in essays on counterfeit art, the moral rights of artists, the artist's resale right (droit de suite), the litigation over the Mark Rothko estate, and problems of museum trustee negligence, conflict of interests, and misuse of inside information. The author, a Professor of Art Law at Stanford University, is a leading international figure in cultural property and art law circles.

Author: John Henry Merryman
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 9041128751
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
The new edition of this insightful work begins with a critical reexamination of the rival Greek and British claims to the Elgin Marbles. That case study identifies the questions that continue to dominate the growing international debate about cultural property policy and which are subsequently explored in a newly expanded array of essays. The work goes on to pay particular attention to the law and policy relating to cultural property export controls and the evolution and development of the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on the Return of Stolen and Illegally Exported Cultural Property. The second part of this highly regarded book addresses a number of contemporary art law issues in essays on counterfeit art, the moral rights of artists, the artist's resale right (droit de suite),the litigation over the Mark Rothko estate, and problems of museum trustee negligence, conflict of interests, and misuse of inside information.

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859842201
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The Elgin Marbles, designed and executed by Phidias to adorn the Parthenon, are some of the most beautiful sculptures of ancient Greece. In 1801 Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Turkish government in Athens, had pieces of the frieze sawn off and removed to Britain, where they remain, igniting a storm of controversy which has continued to the present day. In the first full-length work on this fiercely debated issue, Christopher Hitchens recounts the history of these precious sculptures and forcefully makes the case for their return to Greece. Drawing out the artistic, moral, legal and political perspectives of the argument, Hitchens's eloquent prose makes The Elgin Marbles an invaluable contribution to one of the most important cultural controversies of our times.

Author: Dorothy King
Publisher: Hutchinson Publishing Group
ISBN: 9780091800130
Category : Classical antiquities
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Oxbow says: This book's author does not shy away from expressing her opinions on the destruction of ancient sites in Greece and her belief that the Elgin Marbles are best left in the care of the British Museum, or at least for the time being.

Author: Patricia Vigderman
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
ISBN: 9780814254585
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Ruminates on ancient remains and antiquities, illuminating an important element of contemporary cultural life: the dynamic between loss and delight.

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Hill & Wang
ISBN: 9780809041893
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Traces the history of the Parthenon, explains how and why its sculptures and friezes were taken to Britain, and discusses the arguments for returning them

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786631822
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The most powerful case yet made for the return of the Parthenon Marbles The Parthenon Marbles (formerly known as the Elgin Marbles), designed and executed by Pheidias to adorn the Parthenon, are perhaps the greatest of all classical sculptures. In 1801, Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Turkish government, had chunks of the frieze sawn off and shipped to England, where they were subsequently seized by Parliament and sold to the British Museum to help pay off his debts. This scandal, exacerbated by the inept handling of the sculptures by their self-appointed guardians, remains unresolved to this day. In his fierce, eloquent account of a shameful piece of British imperial history, Christopher Hitchens makes the moral, artistic, legal and political case for re-unifying the Parthenon frieze in Athens. The opening of the New Acropolis Museum emphatically trumps the British Museum’s long-standing (if always questionable) objection that there is nowhere in Athens to house the Parthenon Marbles. With contributions by Nadine Gordimer and Professor Charalambos Bouras, The Parthenon Marbles will surely end all arguments about where these great treasures belong, and help bring a two-centuries-old disgrace to a just conclusion.

Author: Tiffany Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198817185
Category : Antiquities
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
For the past two centuries and more, the West has acquired the treasures of antiquity to fill its museums, so that visitors to the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York - to name but a few - can wonder at the ingenuity of humanity throughout the ages. However, in the opinion of most people, many of these items are looted property and should be returned immediately. In 'Keeping Their Marbles', Tiffany Jenkins tells the intriguing and sometimes bloody story of how the West came to acquire these treasures. Originally published: 2016.

Author: Ian Dennis Jenkins
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026926
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
The Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum are unrivaled examples of classical Greek art, an inspiration to artists and writers since their creation in the fifth century bce. A superb visual introduction to these wonders of antiquity, this book offers a photographic tour of the most famous of the surviving sculptures from ancient Greece, viewed within their cultural and art-historical context. Ian Jenkins offers an account of the history of the Parthenon and its architectural refinements. He introduces the sculptures as architecture--pediments, metopes, Ionic frieze--and provides an overview of their subject matter and possible meaning for the people of ancient Athens. Accompanying photographs focus on the pediment sculptures that filled the triangular gables at each end of the temple; the metopes that crowned the architrave surmounting the outer columns; and the frieze that ran around the four sides of the building, inside the colonnade. Comparative images, showing the sculptures in full and fine detail, bring out particular features of design and help to contrast Greek ideas with those of other cultures. The book further reflects on how, over 2,500 years, the cultural identity of the Parthenon sculptures has changed. In particular, Jenkins expands on the irony of our intimate knowledge and appreciation of the sculptures--a relationship far more intense than that experienced by their ancient, intended spectators--as they have been transformed from architectural ornaments into objects of art.

Author: Joan Breton Connelly
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.