Further reflections on toxic antiquities

Earlier this year I wrote about the impact of "toxic antiquities". In other words antiquities that have surfaced on the market in an illicit manner and then lurk in a private collection or as part of a dealer's stock for some years before resurfacing. Take some recent examples:

• The Egyptian funerary reliefs in the Louvre. At least one piece is reported to have surfaced in a London auction house in the 1980s.
• A Corinthian column-krater seized in New York. It featured in a photograph from the Medici archive.
• An Apulian hydria withdrawn from a London sale. It came from a London auction in the 1980s that appears to have had links with Medici. [See also comments on material withdrawn from the same sale.]

The objects could have been purchased in "good faith" but it does not lessen the impact of the bad publicity if a government such as Egypt or Italy makes a claim.

We need to remember that there are well over 10,000 unidentified antiquities waiting for somebody to make the connection between a polaroid seized in a police raid in, say, Geneva or on, say, a Greek island, and the piece appearing in a sale or a museum catalogue.

So what can auction-houses do to protect their reputations? Why not avoid selling any ancient object that does not have a properly documented collecting history that can be traced back to the 1960s?

And what can museums and private collectors do to avoid the sort of "corrosive" publicity that has been attached to the returns to Egypt, Greece, and Italy? They should avoid objects that do not have a properly documented collecting history that can be traced back to the 1960s.