Page 162 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Indiana Jones and the Illicit Trafficking and Repatriation… 153

this area of research often includes the use of visual depictions such as the
inclusion of photographs of the multitude of cultural objects at the heart of this
research, which provides a nice illustrative element that legal research often
lacks and can help generate public interest. [Merryman] [Goldrich]. Moreover,
many cultural objects themselves have inspired countless songs and poems.
Leonardo Da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa inspired Ray Evans and Jay Livingston to
write the song of the same name first made famous by Nat King Cole and then
countless others who crooned:

―Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.
You‘re so like the lady with the mystic smile.‖ [Livingston & Evans]

It is not surprising that the very emotive nature of the repatriation of
objects also has moved famous poets to lament their removal and press for
their return. In fact, one of the most famous cases in this field of research
inspired Lord Byron to scribe such poems. In both The Curse of Minerva
[1811] and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage [1812], Byron laments the removal of
marbles from the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin in the eighteenth century.
Speaking as Minerva to Byron, he wrote in part:

―Lo! Here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive tyrannies expire.
‗Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.‖

The following passage is illustrative of Byron‘s lament:

―But most the modern Pict‘s ignoble boast,
To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:
Cold as the crags upon his native coast,
His mind as barren and his heart as hard,
Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared,
Aught to displace Athena‘s poor remains.‖ [Merryman, p.1904).

These marbles, now known as the Elgin Marbles, stand in the British
Museum and at the heart of one of the most famous controversies in the area
of the repatriation of cultural objects and so frequently have been explored and
referenced in this area of research. [Merryman] [Autocephalous Greek-
Orthodox Church].
Yet, despite its relative openness to these more obvious uses of
unconventional sources, the research into the illicit trafficking and repatriation