The reference is to the frieze made under the supervision of Phidias for the Parthenon. The frieze, together with sculpture from the pediments and metopes, was removed from the Parthenon by the agents of Lord Elgin. The collection was brought to Britain between 1802 and 1812, and housed initially on Elgin's property. It was bought by the British Government for £35,000 in 1816, and installed in the British Museum.
The Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Earl of Elgin's Collection of Marbles (1816) shows the members of the committee probing expert witnesses on the quality of the work and using as their standard for judgement a canon including the Apollo Belvedere, the Torso of the Vatican, and the Laocoon. John Flaxman R.A. answered that the 'Elgin Marbles' were the most excellent of their kind that he had seen, and Richard Westmacott R.A.suggested that the' Theseus' - now identified as Dionysus - from the east pediment of the Parthenon was infinitely superior to the Apollo Belvedere. In his evidence to the Parliamentary Select Committeee on the National Gallery of 1853, Westmacott described the 'Elgin Marbles' as the finest things in the world.
Haydon's diary entry for November 1809 suggested that because of their reference to nature the 'Elgin Marbles' would 'overthrow' the 'methodised' marble forms of works such as the Apollo Belvedere which had for Reynolds defined the standard against which sculpture was judged (see the polished limbs of the Apollo). In 1810 Haydon compared the 'Elgin Marbles' with the work of Giotto. The Parthenon Frieze and Raphael's Cartoons, came to be seen as the supreme expression of Western art, and therefore it was considered appropriate that they should be in London, the capital of the greatest empire the world had known (see Shearman, Raphael's Cartoons, page 164).
Ruskin said that 'the Elgins' had spoiled him for all sculpture except that of Michelangelo (see Ruskin on Michelangelo). However there is an ambivalence in his attitude to the old canon established before the 'rediscovery' of the Parthenon sculptures. There had been one reference in the First Edition of Modern Painters I page 39 line 22, to the Laocoon as an example of work showing 'knowledge which must have taken a life-time to accumulate', but this was excised in the third edition. At Works, 4.120 Ruskin compares the Laocoon unfavourably with the' Theseus' from the Parthenon. Again he refers to the 'accumulation of technical knowledge' it shows, but describes it as 'meanly conceived and unnaturally treated'. The Venus de' Medici and the Apollo are mentioned at MP I:404, and there they are second only to the Torso of the Vatican. However at MP I:33, in a passage which reads as if it is deliberately setting out to challenge what Ruskin sees as conventional views, he stresses the 'life' of the Parthenon friezes by comparison with the Apollo.
See Ruskin and the Italian School.