LONDON – So there is a cure for museum fatigue: Aphrodite’s bottom.

There she was, crouching at her bath just inside the entrance to the British Museum’s special exhibit, “Defining Beauty,” which opened in London today. It was the first glimpse of what would become the best experience I have ever had in all the years of trailing Courtenay through museums around the world.

There was room after room of amazing and sometimes colossal objects not only from the British Museum’s huge collection of Greek art but also from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Glyptothek in Copenhagen.

Nothing on loan from the new Acropolis Museum in Greece, though, and more on that later.

There was vase after amazing vase with images of myth, war, love and sex created hundreds of years before Christ. There was a bronze youth with a lithe, powerful body recently found in the sea off Croatia. The youth even had copper highlights on his lips and nipples There was the Discus Thrower of Myron in his throwing pose. There was a touching, life-sized bronze baby holding his arms out for love.

And there were some of the Elgin Marbles, the spectacular sculptures that once ringed the top of the Parthenon on the Acropolis that sits high above Athens. They are perhaps the most beautiful and controversial sculptures on Earth, and ones that Courtenay and I have argued about many times.

They were removed from the Parthenon for “safekeeping” by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s, and have been held, preserved and displayed in the British Museum ever since. Greece wants them back, and it is so insistent that it refused to contribute any objects to the British Museum’s major Greek exhibition. I understand the arguments for keeping the Elgin Marbles here: They are integral to the British Museum, and returning them to Greece would set a precedent that would send shudders through the great museums of the world.

And yet, I believe they should one day be displayed in the beautiful new museum that Greece has built at the foot of the Acropolis. The panels are amazing, including heroes grappling with centaurs and horses so lifelike, with veins bulging in their legs, that you can almost imagine the thunder of their hooves.

We went on to spend several more hours in the British Museum, which has millions of pieces displayed in miles and miles of hallways and exhibit spaces. We saw incredible things, including Eyptian mummies and the remnants of a man whose body was preserved in a bog for more than two thousand years. Eventually our legs tired and the huge groups of roving schoolkids took over the museum, and we made our way outside.

The rest of the day is largely a blur — the English fish and chips for lunch, the special exhibit in the nearby British Library of the actual copies of the Magna Carta and other documents of what would become democracy, the tattered sheets of paper with the Beatles lyrics, the 300-step climb with Will up the monument to the Great Fire, the bustle and smells of meat pies, cheese and breads of the Borough Market.

All I can see clearly tonight is that frightening Centaur, those stampeding horses, those muscular boys with the impossibly tight stomachs, that baby reaching out with chubby arms, that crouching Aphrodite.

Beauty does last.

But this is now Courtenay, and I get the final word on this post: does anyone remember the esteemed art critic, E. Buzz Miller? That’s all I have to add…