LONDON.- History can take an unexpected turn thanks to a horse’s head, as a fan of the saga of godfather. In this case, the challenge is not very bloody, but maybe this is the beginning of the end historical discord just as intense and profound: one that has been faced for more than a century Greek and English for Parthenon Marblesstatues created by Phidias, on the orders of Pericles, 2,500 years ago to adorn the decorations, metopees and two pediments of this architectural marvel and symbol of democracy.

Solution for bitter and endless strife can be found at 3D printing technology. The head of this story corresponds to one of the two horses pulling the chariot of the goddess Selene, the Moon Goddess. It seems to emerge from the water, as a symbol of dawn, on the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, the temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. This is the most universally recognized horse head in the entire history of art. And it was part of the loot that Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, managed to transfer from Athens to London. Nearly half of the Parthenon statues, which even Bruce ordered, in some cases, to look hard to separate them from the building. He later became ambassador of the British Empire to the Turkish-Ottoman Empire, under the rule of Athens. He eventually sold the statues to the British Museum in 1816 for 35,000 pounds, about three million euros at today’s values. Greece’s democratic government has struggled for decades for the reunification of the marbles, which have become symbols of wounded national pride.

In March this year, a team from the Oxford-based Institute of Digital Archeology (IDA) asked the museum for permission to scan pieces of marble. They wanted to work on submillimeter-accurate replicas, which would help positively resolve the conflict that has been raising tensions between supporters and opponents of devolution for too long. “For fifty years, the British Museum has justified keeping the pieces on the idea that the institution’s purpose is encyclopedic, and that in addition to preserving them, they are placing them in a wider historical and cultural context so that people will understand them. their meaning. importance,” explains Roger Michael, executive director of IDA. The museum, suspicious of the idea, rejected the proposal. But admission is free, and no one has the intellectual rights to work with twenty-five centuries of history. Equipped with an iPhone equipped with a Lidar sensor, the basic technology for the next reproduction in 3D printing, a team of engineers from the institute took photos of the exhibited work.

At a factory in Carrara, Italy, robots equipped with diamond tips to carve marble worked non-stop for four days to complete Selene’s horse head. Roger presented it yesterday at a place in London as symbolic as the Sigmund Freud House Museum. The father of psychoanalysis lived there his last years. The legendary cot remained in the office, and all the shelves were filled with figures from the ancient culture that Freud loved so much. Next to the table is a statue of the goddess Athena.

“Freud developed object relation theory. That’s why we chose this environment,” explains Roger. “Objects, he said, are mirrors of our souls. When we see it, we see in it what we ourselves include.” This somewhat adventurous, somewhat idealistic, and also somewhat arrogant philhellenist, defended that his proposal could reverse an entrenched situation by changing the approach to art exhibitions. “The Romans themselves had thousands of copies of Greek works, which they made themselves. The British Museum has more than 10,000 replicas throughout its premises, which helps to easily explain what the past was all about. This horse head can tell its own story, and if it helps resolve disputes, become a monument with a new meaning in itself,” he said.

The replica shown is perfect, but almost blinding white. It can take months to get the ocher-tone patina that centuries of history—and moisture, and poor conservation care—had given to the original. Those in charge of the British Museum have yet to respond to the challenge, but neither have they attempted to launch any legal response. The debate over the reunification of marbles has always lingered in England, where “committees” supporting the return of works have mushroomed, and relevant figures from the worlds of politics, art or literature have defended what the majority of citizens, survey after survey, recognize as the solution. logical and fair: the return of the marbles to the Parthenon. Only the complex legal arguments put forward by the museum management, convincing less and less people, made it possible to stop the return. 3D technology, as seen in the Freud House Museum, has added a new perspective to the deadlocked debate, and emptied the pedagogical vocation of those in favor of keeping marbles in London.

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