"Do whatever you can to avoid admitting the unattractive truth"

Peter Watson has written a short piece in The Times (7 March 2019) about the return of antiquities to Italy by Christie's. He reminds readers about how the story was revealed in The Times back in 2014, and that the identifications had, in part, been due to the research of Dr Christos Tsirogiannis. Watson writes:

The man who spotted the looted objects in the 2014 sales was Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek-born forensic archaeologist. Though Christie's was aware of this tainted history, it still took it five years to persuade the consignors of these objects that they were looted. So it's a little rich for Christie's to talk of the "voluntary" return of these artefacts. It was embarrassed into doing so. A spokeswoman for Christie's conceded last week that Dr Tsirogiannis was right about the objects he spotted. She added that illicit antiquities were a minute amount of a predominantly "honourable" market.

See my comments on the Apulian hydria, the glass oinochoe, the Etruscan terracotta antefix, the satyr relief and the Roman sarcophagus fragment.