[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”PjVNV5Zdugg8HexsYqCyx57z1XQQw7KI”]<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dear George Clooney,<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As another Lexington, Kentucky boy, I\u2019ve often wanted to write a fan letter to you. (I\u2019ve been told that some members of our families knew each other, though I\u2019m a good deal older than you, and left my old KY home when you were a child.)<\/p>\n
Monuments Men<\/i> is the perfect excuse, as I\u2019m now working on a feature\u00a0 and a video piece for The Wall Street Journal<\/i> about an old friend, Anne Olivier Bell, who was a Monuments Woman. (Most will know her as the editor of the diaries of her aunt-by-marriage, Virginia Woolf.)\u00a0 I haven\u2019t yet seen your film, but have tickets for its first screening tonight.<\/p>\n
But now you\u2019ve gone and said something silly about the Elgin Marbles (that\u2019s pronounced with a hard g<\/i>, by the way), and made it even worse by suggesting they be returned to the Pantheon, rather than to their original home in the Parthenon.<\/p>\n
So I just have to add my two cents-worth (in truth, I\u2019ve lived in England so much longer than in the US, that it comes more naturally to me to say tuppence-worth). As I\u2019m sure you\u2019re aware, the Parthenon friezes were endangered when Lord Elgin bought<\/i> them in 1816, having shipped them to London with the permission of the Ottoman authorities. Yes, there is controversy, but title is clear: they were not stolen or illegally exported.<\/p>\n
But, as another friend, Ben Macintyre, points out in today\u2019s The Times<\/i> (that\u2019s our national \u00a0Times<\/i>, not New York\u2019s), Britain has been a remarkably conscientious safe-keeper of these wonderful objects that I (and millions of others) have seen so many times in the British Museum. During the War your movie deals with, they were the subject of a magnificent preservation effort that was ordered by Churchill and carried out in total secrecy, so that the Nazis never even got wind of their whereabouts.<\/p>\n
Carefully packed up in crates, the Elgin Marbles were hidden in the disused Tube tunnel at Aldwych, deep underground and protected from German bombing. They stayed there until 1948, safe and secure, though the Luftwaffe and the V1 and V2 rockets rained destruction on London, even scoring a hit on the British Museum and three on the National Gallery, breaking almost every pane of glass in its windows.<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s stewardship of the Elgin Marbles has been faultless (save for an episode of over-cleaning). Would the world still have them today if they had remained in Athens? That\u2019s a rhetorical question: the answer is almost certainly No. And is Greece now stable enough to ensure their security? Another rhetorical question.<\/p>\n
As Ben Macintyre quipped today: \u201cClooney has earned a place in the \u2018Parthenon\u2019 of great Hollywood actors, but he should brush up on his art history.\u201d<\/p>\n
I expect I\u2019ll love the film, though.<\/p>\n
Yours ever,<\/p>\n
Paul<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”PjVNV5Zdugg8HexsYqCyx57z1XQQw7KI”] Dear George Clooney, As another Lexington, Kentucky boy, I\u2019ve often wanted to write a fan letter to you. (I\u2019ve been told that some members of our families knew each other, though I\u2019m a good deal older than you, and left my old KY home when you were a child.) Monuments […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Elgin_Marbles_British_Museum1.jpg?fit=1298%2C1007&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-dg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}