Apulian pottery and loss of knowledge

Ricardo Elia of Boston University has conducted significant research on Apulian pottery. His study has suggested that as little as 5.5% of the Apulian corpus has been derived from scientific excavations. And if we put this another way 94.5% of Apulian pots do not have a scientifically recorded context. In other words, we do not know what else was found in the tomb: for example, other pots, terracotta figures, bronze armour, jewellery, single or multiple burials, or the gender of the bodies buried with the pots. And this has implications for understanding the stylistic development of the pottery. Were pots attributed to the same hand placed in the same grave? Were pots from the same broad workshops placed together? Are workshops linked to specific cemeteries? Deliberate destruction of the funerary record of ancient Apulia has caused extensive and permanent loss of knowledge.

Apulian pots featured prominently in the "Nostoi" exhibitions in Rome. Some 50 Apulian pots were reportedly seized on the frontier between France and Spain in 2000. In 2008 about 4400 antiquities were returned from Switzerland to Italy in three truckloads; approximately half were reported to have been derived from Apulian tombs.

Princeton returned an Apulian loutrophoros attributed to the Darius painter (though it was then placed on loan). The Darius painter is significant as an amphora and a pelike were returned to Italy from Boston's Museum of Fine Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, a volute-krater from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and a dinos from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are still unanswered questions surrounding the collecting history of a large "funerary" group of Apulian pots in Berlin that included three volute-kraters attributed to the Darius painter.

One major private collection of Apulian pottery was owned by Graham Geddes who even had an anonymous pot-painter, the Geddes painter, named in his honour. The "most important" piece in the sale of further Apulian pieces from the Geddes collection had to be withdrawn from auction in October 2008. Two other Apulian pieces from his collection were withdrawn from the same sale. All three had surfaced at Sotheby's London in the 1980s.

Robin Symes is also linked with an Apulian krater that was offered at (and withdrawn from) a London auction in 2008.

In 2009 an Apulian situla was seized after passing through a New York auction-house in June of that year. It was subsequently described by a spokesperson for the auction-house as a "stolen" artifact.

And now an Apulian rhyton in the shape of a goat's head with white-painted horns is up for auction at Christie's later this week. It appears similar to an image in the Medici dossier. There have been calls for the rhyton to be withdrawn from the sale, although a spokesperson for Christie's has made it clear that the auction-house intends to proceed.

Image
Left,  Apulian rhyton featured in the Medici Dossier (courtesy of Christos Tsirogiannis); right, Apulian situla reportedly seized from a New York auction-house in 2009.