Tonight at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London, the unveiling of a Parthenon sculpture carved from the same Greek marble used on the originals 2,500 years ago. The sculpture of a horse’s head, carved by robots from marble provided Mount Pentelicus, Greece, is a replica of one of half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures held by the British Museum since Lord Elgin took them from the  Athens in the early 19th century.

The Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) created the replica of the horses head, the chariot horse of the goddess Selene, currently in the British Museum from a one-tonne chunk of marble from the same quarry on Mount Pentelicus that Phidias used in the 5th century BC.

The IDA tweeted yesterday: 

Roger Michel, the founder of the IDA, had recently spoken to George Osborne, the British Museum chairman, about displaying the replicas, adding that this had not been ruled out. More on this inThe Times. 

"I found the UCLA/Getty program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage with the presentation by Roger Michel, the Executive Director of The Institute for Digital Archaeology very  interesting. Especially Roger Michel's longish parenthesis on the ‘whiteness mania’ of the British Museum. It’s Britishness stronger than the ‘Museumness' of it.

The BM discarding its old tropes so it moves into the zeitgeist of the 21stC, the sheer quality of objects from Athens they could then have to show, once the Marbles are where they have to be, and Roger's unexpected optimism about George Osborne himself. That surprised me. Of course I am learning all the time.

I find myself much more taken with the positives that could occur once the dam wall is breached than who did what when; things move so fast now. " Janet Suzman, Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM).