How Italy Has Reignited The Parthenon Marbles Debate

Part of a foot belonging to the goddess Artemis is prompting some of the world’s finest museums to see the bigger picture on the repatriation of colonial treasures, writes Moira Lavelle

- Moira Lavelle

On its own, the marble fragment is modest – the size of a child’s backpack. It shows a right foot draped with diaphanous fabric. The foot belongs to the goddess Artemis, and is part of the monumental 158m (518ft) Ionic frieze depicting mortals and gods of ancient Greece on the inner layer of the Parthenon temple in Athens.

The marble piece has spent decades in the Antonino Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo, Sicily. In a landmark deal this week, it was sent to Greece in exchange for an ancient statue and an amphora.

Most of the remainder of the frieze is currently in the British Museum, and the move by Italy is seen by many as putting more pressure on the British to return the artefacts to Greece, reigniting one of the art world’s most heated and long-running disputes.

“ The whole debate has really struck a chord,” said Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who attended a ceremony to welcome the fragment. “I do sense there is a momentum building, and of course, the elephant in the room is the discussion we will have to have with the British Museum.”

Currently 15 of the Parthenon’s metope sculptures, 17 pedimental figures, and large parts of the north and south friezes are in the British Museum. Starting in 1801, Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, spliced these pieces from their bases, and in 1816 he sold them to the museum, where they have been displayed since.

The newly welcomed fragment from Italy was sold to the museum in Sicily from the collection of late-1800s British diplomat Robert Fagan, though it’s not clear how he acquired it. The director of the Acropolis Museum, Nikolaos Stampolidis, underlines that the fragment is not on loan.