The Elgin Room is named after Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (pronounced with hard 'g'), Ambassador to the Porte, who in 1801-3 collected numerous sculptures at Athens, which he saw being daily destroyed, and in 1816 sold them to the British Government for �35,000, i.e. half what they had cost him to remove. The collection includes sculptures, not only from the Parthenon but from the Erechtheion and elsewhere, and casts from marbles which were left in situ. These casts compared with later casts (also in this room) show that damage to the originals went on after Lord Elgin's time. The most important of the Elgin Marbles are the sculptures of the PARTHENON or temple of Athene Parthenos (the Virgin), the patron goddess of Athens, which stood on the Acropolis. Models of this Doric temple and of the whole Acropolis are exhibited in the north-west corner of the room.
The Parthenon was built on the site of an older temple on the Acropolis, and was paid for out of the treasure of the Confederacy of Delos, the naval federation of Greek States which was the outcome of the victories won over the Persians in 490-479 B.C. The architect was Iktinos, but Pheidias probably supervised the general plan as well as the sculpture, though he may not personally have carved more than the celebrated colossal chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Athene Parthenos. In later centuries the Parthenon was used as a Christian church, a mosque, aud a powder-magazine. In 1687, during the siege of Athens by the Venetians under Morosini, the centre of the temple was largely destroyed by an explosion caused by a shell aimed by a German artillery officer. Fortunately, however, a French artist, probably Jacques Carrey, had made many drawings of the Parthenon sculptures in 1674, which enable us to reconstruct much that was destroyed in and after 1687. Photographs of some of these drawings (now in Paris) are shown here.
The sculptures of the Parthenon are both traditionally and generally held to be the greatest sculptures ever executed. They should be compared with those of the temple of Zeus at Olympia (still on the spot; comp. the models and casts in the Cast Gallery), about 20 years earlier in date, which show the last traces of the archaic stiffness, from which art in the Parthenon sculptures has just achieved freedom. The sculptures included the Pediment Groups, the Metopes, and the Frieze.
Pheidias's temple statue of Athene is represented by three casts of copies (Nos. 300, 300A, 301), very inartistic but instructive, and by a fragment of a copy of the shield (302). On the shield the bald-headed figure and the helmeted figure with right arm raised before the face are, by ancient tradition, supposed to be portraits of Pheidias and Pericles.
