Frieze frame: how poets, painters, and their friends framed the debate around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

Uittreksel

"In this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles, award-winning poet and writer A. E. Stallings discusses the removal of the Marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum (from shipwreck to boxing matches), and the debate over their future and possible reunion in Greece. Bringing fresh air to a stale debate, Frieze Frame explores the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa--how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles' place in art and culture. The poets Keats, Byron, and Cavafy, as well as an aristocrat who loses his nose and his fortune, a bad painter who commits suicide, and a general who takes his cat into battle, are among the cast of characters. In the author's own words, 'I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and people surrounding the stones as the controversy [over their removal] and their fate.' Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth (and twentieth) century writing and art, race theory and beyond, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures, maybe even characters, in their own right."--from the back cover.

Inhoud

Marbles, Fast and Loose -- Part I: Shadows and magnitude -- Rock and ruin -- As poetical in Piccadilly -- Imperishable columns, immortal dinner -- In-valuable -- Another painter -- "Characteristics...of an intellectual European" -- "The more beautiful the whiter it is" -- Part II: "It gives the dirt a polish" -- Mountain and monument -- Duveen's deep clean -- Lost in translation -- Shanghaied to Bloomsbury -- On the tack of caring for Greek sculpture -- Greek poets and the marbles -- Enchanted bodies -- A Centaur at the wedding -- The Temple of the Cari-something -- Part III: Eyewitnesses -- Carrots and sticks -- Regretted by all -- Turks and Greeks -- A Light-filled mosque -- Turks, travelers, and time -- "Detached heads" -- Interlude: Washed away -- Mercouri -- "Memorably to camera" -- Losing the marbles -- The White line -- Old drums -- Part IV: Bullets, again -- An Intellectual clockwork -- Polarizing celebrities -- Ringing the changes -- A Tale of two cities, two museums -- A Creative act? -- Divided narratives -- Begging the question -- A Breakthrough? -- Room 19 -- "Scattered to the light" -- Would it be permissible to speak of a caryatid? -- Appendix A: Word problems: Money, math, and marbles -- Appendix B : A Modern timeline of the Parthenon and the marbles of the Acropolis -- Appendix C: Architectural elements of the Parthenon -- Appendix D: Translation of the Italian translation of the Firman, as listed in the Appendix to the 1816 Special Committee Report -- Appendix E: Lord Byron's The Curse of the Minerva -- Some acknowledgments -- Some sources consulted.