‘Frieze Frame’ Review: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles

In early 19th-century London, the arrival of temple artworks taken from the Acropolis of Athens inspired both poetic raptures and angry condemnations.

By Maxwell Carter

May 23, 2025 11:31 am ET

The debate surrounding the rightful place of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Acropolis, the site of the ancient complex of temples that overlooks Athens, by agents of Lord Elgin and delivered to London in the first years of the 19th century, is an old one—so old that its terms were framed by the poets Byron and Keats in the 1810s, soon after the Marbles’ arrival in England.

Keats’s 1817 visit to the British Museum, where the Marbles had been recently installed, inspired his rapturous sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (“My spirit is too weak—Mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep”). His companion at the museum, the history painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon, encouraged the British government to purchase from Elgin the portions of the Parthenon frieze that he had acquired, and it is not unreasonable to suppose Keats agreed. He returned to examine them “again and again,” his friend Joseph Severn remembered, “and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.” Keats’s reflections on mortality were not merely for effect—his death, of tuberculosis, came four years later.

Byron, by contrast, was more outraged than transported. His long autobiographical poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (1812-18) as well as the privately printed screed “The Curse of Minerva” (1812) denounced Elgin (“His mind as barren and his heart as hard”) and the despoliation of the Marbles.

In “Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and Their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon,” the poet A.E. Stallings surveys responses to the Marbles by artists, writers and public figures from Keats and Bryon to Boris Johnson (who, true to form, has argued with equal conviction both to return the Marbles and to keep them in Britain).

Ms. Stallings cites the four points that the British government’s Select Committee was formed to address in 1816: “the Authority” by which the Marbles were acquired; the “circumstances under which that Authority was granted”; the “Merit of the Marbles”; and “their Value as objects of sale.” The Marbles’ “Merit” and “Value” were uncontroversial; however, the questions of authority and circumstances remain as contested now as they were then.

Elgin’s authority hinged on his position as ambassador to the Ottoman Sublime Porte, which he assumed in 1798, on the heels of Adm. Horatio Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon’s naval forces at the Battle of the Nile. There were (and remain) questions about the validity and wording of the firman (the permit from the Ottoman government) that licensed the expropriation of the Marbles. If it existed at all—for “proof,” we have Elgin’s word and anecdotal evidence—the firman more likely sanctioned taking away “some stones” or “a stone” rather than “any stones.” Ms. Stallings notes that the Marbles had begun to be extracted even before Elgin reached Athens. And that he ultimately spent only 59 days in the city.

“Frieze Frame” is not an entreaty or examination of the moral case for the Marbles’ return, however. Ms. Stallings’s compact, original book is interested instead in their literary and aesthetic reception over time.

As she observes, there was an immediate and enduring obsession with the whiteness of the Marbles. Felicia Hemans’s 1817 poem “Modern Greece” celebrated their purity and chasteness. And they attracted race theorists, including Haydon—although he was “only a dabbler in race theory,” according to Ms. Stallings—and the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox, the model for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Knox extolled the “superiority of the Elgin marbles to all others”; his biographer, Henry Lonsdale, once likened an 18-year-old girl’s unblemished corpse to the Marbles.

That the Marbles were initially polychrome was conveniently ignored or denied. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends” (1868) dared portray the freshly painted frieze as it might have looked and, the author relates, was duly criticized for “bad archaeology” and “fairground colours.”

London’s noxious pollution—in contrast to Athens’s preindustrial, “mountain-cleansed” air—was the worst possible atmosphere for preserving the Marbles’ whiteness. The grime that accumulated led inevitably and disastrously to Lord Duveen’s 20th-century overcleaning of their surfaces, with an associated loss of detail and patina. Ms. Stallings reproduces rueful verses from the Irish nationalist Roger Casement, about their dire environment: “Give back the Elgin marbles; let them lie / Unsullied, pure beneath an Attic sky. / The smoky fingers of our northern clime / More ruin work than all the ancient time.”

Others lamented the Marbles’ exile on anti-imperialist grounds. A.E. Housman imagined what the Greek statues at the British Museum might say to the onlooker:

Previously, Ms. Stalling recounts, the Victorian man of letters Richard Monckton Milnes had derided the clock Elgin left to bemused Athenians “as a token of his gratitude” for the Marbles: “I have often thought how like the situation of all the world, now-a-days, is to that of these Athenians; they are losing all things of beauty and grandeur that they possess, and receiving in return some worthless intellectual clock-work.” The Greek poet Achilleas Paraschos conveyed perhaps the strongest anticlock sentiment: “Set fire to it, burn it, to the four winds, / Scatter its dust. Let no sign of it remain.”

No study of the Marbles can altogether ignore the rationales offered for keeping them under British care (Elgin’s claim was fair; they were rescued from the less attentive stewardship of the Turks and the Greeks; restitution could lead to completely unwinding encyclopedic institutions) or the corresponding rebuttals. The great poet C.P. Cavafy remonstrated in 1891 that “the Elgin Marbles serve no other purpose than that of beautifying the British Museum, which even without them is full of objects of the greatest beauty and value.”

Whether they are shown in London or Athens, the Marbles will always be one of history’s singular Rorschach tests. Keats saw beauty; Byron saw tragedy; in “Frieze Frame,” readers may see some version of themselves.

Mr. Carter is the vice chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York.