Who owns beauty ? World art and culture in our museums (3)

The Pergamon Altar or Altar of Zeus, built in the 2nd^century BC, was discovered in fragmentary form by Prussian archaeologists in present-day Turkey, on the site of the ancient kingdom of Pergamon, in a town now known as Bergama. It has now been reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum, which was specially designed to house it. This monumental Hellenistic "object" from the kingdom of Pergamon, measuring 30 by 30 meters and 12 meters high, is also remarkable for the marble frieze depicting a gigantomachy, the battle of the gods against the giants. This lecture traces the arrival of the altar from Bergamo to Berlin, in its technological context - it was the invention of the steamboat that made this monumental transfer possible. The altar was also the subject of political disputes, in the 19th^century with the Ottoman Empire, and during the Second World War, when it was shipped to Moscow. This "reconstructed" altar was politically charged, in the context of Germany's separation, when the Soviet Union, which had taken it, returned it to the GDR, which considered it the flagship of its collection. Today, the Pergamon Altar is referred to as " shared heritage", but being located in a single place, Berlin, it is also the subject of multiple claims.