A boy, a bearded man and a horse go to Athens, and some women get lost along the way. This is not the start of yet another one of the ghastly crime stories affecting women in our country and beyond, but the likely unintended consequence of the most recent act of the Parthenon repatriation saga. 

Earlier this month, the governor of the Vatican City and the director of the Vatican Museums met in Rome with the Greek Culture Minister and an envoy of the Archbishop of Athens. They signed off on the handover to the Greeks of three fragments of sculptures attributed to the Parthenon, which have been part of the Vatican art collections for the last two centuries. The deal is carefully defined as a donation from one man of the cloth to another, to avoid paving the way to further requests for more controversial objects. In one of those ironic correspondences in history, another absolute monarch now disposes of some items of cultural value that he feels no particular attachment to, just to strengthen a political bond. Even more ironic, the same act that has been condemned since 1801 when the actors were Lord Elgin and the Ottoman deputy Grand Vizir, is now praised far and wide and hailed as a precedent for more substantial acts of “restitution”. 

The horse head was left neglected in a side room for more than a century

Two of the fragments in question, a partial horse head from Athena’s chariot in the West pediment and the bearded centaur head from one of the South metopes, are likely to come from Venice, where they have been probably brought by components of the short-lived Venetian expedition against the Ottomans in 1687-88. It was during the siege operations that a mortar shell hit the Parthenon, which at the time was full of ammunition for the Turkish military garrison on the Acropolis, in what the Venetian general Morosini called “a fortunate shot”. The conflagration was devastating, decimating the garrison and instantly transforming the old but until then still serviceable building into a ruin. The central sections of the north and south sides of the temple were gone, fragments of metopes scattered all over the sacred rock; blocks of the ionic frieze that surrounded the cella were hurled metres away from the foot of the building, with the walls they once crowned no longer standing on three of the four sides. The pediment sculptures, until then in reasonably good state of preservation according to a series of sketches taken some years before, were shaken and partially dislodged by the blast. As soon as they conquered the fortress, some of the soldiers started picking up the fruits of the devastation. A few of those fragments eventually found their way to Venice and from there to Rome, purchased by the curators of the papal collections.

The upper part of the figure of a young tray-bearer from the frieze has a somewhat different story, revolving around the British consul in Palermo, Robert Fagan. Fagan was a painter, art dealer and amateur archaeologist who had amassed a substantial collection during his residence in Rome first and Sicily later. Influential and connected with British society in Italy (mainly diplomats, merchants and Englishmen on their Grand Tour), he is likely to have been in contact with Lord Elgin and to have acquired from him his two Parthenon fragments. Whilst one was bought by the University Museum of Palermo on the death of the consul, the fragment with the boy remained with the young widow, who started to sell off the collection some years later, oppressed by the debts left by her suicidal husband. Most of his collections remained in Sicily, but some report that she sent this particular fragment to Pius VII as a gift and a sign of admiration around 1820. 

Whilst the fragment from Palermo was attributed to the Parthenon quite early on, through the acumen of German scholar Walter Amelung, this was not the case for all the fragments. The horse head, in particular, was left neglected on a side in a room of the Apostolic Palace for more than a century. This changed just after the end of WWII, thanks to the patient documentation work of Hermine Speier, a woman whose extraordinary story has recently been narrated by Benedicte Lutaud in her book Femmes de Popes. A brilliant archaeologist when female archaeologists were still an uncommon sight, Hermine Speier made a name for herself at the German Archaeological Institute in Rome as a photo-archivist — until Hitler’s first racial laws excluded all Jewish people from public employment by German institutions, including those based abroad. Luckily, she was on good terms with Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pius XII), who convinced Pope Pius XI to employ her — a woman and a Jew — in the Vatican Museums. 

These histories of women may be swept away into the fine dust of the footnotes

The Pope agreed to the historical first, wanting to send a clear message against both antisemitism and prejudice against women, even if on a fixed contract paid a daily rate. Hermine immediately started the monumental work of documenting the collections of ancient sculpture and organising a photographic archive, creating much of the support material for the catalogue published by Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg. This work put her in the position to fully appreciate the horse head fragment, and she was the first to recognise it as a piece of Greek sculpture of the highest calibre, finalising its identification as a product by the hand of Phidias originating from the Parthenon itself and publishing the fragment in 1956. After the war, Hermine became a fixture of the Roman cultural scene, running one of the most successful circles of German-speaking intellectuals in Rome from her own house. Hermine had in the meantime become a Catholic. After her death occurred in 1989, she was buried in the Vatican, fulfilling a wish granted to her by Pius XII, who had protected her since 1934 and helped her to hide from the SS when it was targeting Jews in Rome in 1943.

Today there are more than 600 women working in the Vatican on a total of around 4000 staff. It is somewhat anticlimactic that it may be one of those women, the present director of the Vatican Museums, to allow these histories of women and their deeds to be swept away into the fine dust of the footnotes in some obscure scholarly work. Once those fragments get to the Acropolis Museum in Athens, who will remember the story of Hermine Speier and Maria Ludovica Fagan? 

It is the presence of those sculptures, outside of what we could define as their natural or original context, that offers the best opportunity to ask questions and to allow the objects to tell us their stories: how they came to be there and what went on around them through the centuries. Once they arrive in the Greek capital, it will only be the nation-building tale of the Parthenon as the crowning achievement of the Greek people to take centre stage, and these other stories, equally important if not more because of their fragility, will be lost to the wider public. I will concede that we may so far have failed to take full advantage of this opportunity by displaying these pieces in relatively modest corners with just a few words to accompany them, as it was certainly the case for the Fagan Fragment preserved in Palermo until the the beginning of 2021. This failure does not detract from the fact that the potential to narrate those stories was there, ready to be unleashed. Whilst the Greeks realise what is admittedly a very marginal gain in terms of completing their collection of Parthenon fragments, this potential will now be taken away from us forever — another victim of what is only a nationalistic restitution obsession.