Part of the Cycladic Corpus of Figures?

(2024)

When you go to a museum to see an exhibition of ancient artifacts you expect them to be … ancient. You have been enticed into the show to see a carefully selected group of objects that are supposed to inform you about the past … and you are left wondering if they are indeed just modern interpretations.

Individuals working on the reconstruction of the Minoan Palace at Knossos on Crete are known to have worked on making elaborate forgeries. One of the most fascinating accounts of a death-bed confession is provided by Sir Leonard Woolley in his wonderfully named autobiography, As I Seem To Remember. These workmen understood what Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator, thought was ‘minoanizing’ and therefore could include details that made museum curators think that they were buying genuine objects from Crete that could then be presented in their public galleries to inform visitors about prehistoric Crete. One of these, the marble “Fitzwilliam Goddess” was acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 1926 and inspired generations of Cambridge students to study the prehistoric cultures of the Aegean. The statue even graced the frontispiece of the first volume of the Cambridge Ancient History. 

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened a new long-term—25 years—exhibition of Cycladicizing marble figures and other objects derived from the collection formed by the North American collector Leonard Stern. Not a single piece comes from a recorded archaeological context, and there is no certainty that all the figures can in fact dated to the third millennium BCE. The presence of forgeries among Cycladic figures is well known, and there is growing evidence that this can be traced back to at least the 1930s — and even before the First World War. This makes due diligence doubly important, not only to root out pieces that have been removed illicitly from archaeological contexts in recent decades—one figure in the collection has been identified in the photographic archive of a well-known Swiss-based handler of recently-surfaced material—but also to ensure that the figure did not pass through routes to the market that are now recognised as suspicious. 

Source: Becchina archive
Courtesy: Christos Tsirogiannis

Figures from the Stern collection feature in the standard works on Cycladic figures such as Pat Getz-Gentle’s Personal Styles in Early Cycladic Sculpture, but this does not necessarily mean that they are ancient. Indeed, her earlier work, Sculptors of the Cyclades, included, by her own later admission, a number of figures that she considered to be of modern creation. 

This is not a problem confined to the Stern collection. Figures in the Goulandris collection displayed in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens equally lacks recorded and secure findspots. 

Archaeologists would seek to understand Cycladic figures that are derived from secure archaeological contexts, whether it be from graves on the island of Naxos, or in stratified deposits from Phylakopi on Melos. Can we allow these insecure pieces to enter the corpus of knowledge, thereby potentially corrupting it?

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Archaeological Context Makes Sense

Amphora illustrated in
 the Schinoussa archive
Source: Christos Tsirogiannis

Archaeological contexts matter. 

This may sound like stating the obvious. But walk into a museum that displays, say, Greek or Roman archaeological material and you may start to ask questions that the object in itself cannot answer. Take an Athenian black-figured amphora. The label will probably tell us that it was made in Athens but we probably want to know where it was found. It is fairly large, and not the sort of object that is found in the cemeteries of ancient Athens. It is fairly complete and so has probably been protected in some sort of tomb cut out of the rock: an Etruscan tomb in central Italy is certainly a possibility. Was it found on its own? Was it part of a set of Athenian ceramic sympotic equipment, that is to say part of the wine-drinking apparatus. We may want to ask why the Etruscans buried their dead with imported Athenian pottery: was it about the iconography? But was the amphora necessarily found in (modern) Tuscany? Could it come from one of the Greek colonial settings in southern Italy or Sicily? 

The museum label may tell us that modern scholarship has attributed it to a named (anonymous) pot-painter. But does that assume that such ‘artists’ were recognised in antiquity? Did symposiasts choose to drink wine out of cups decorated by ‘named’ individuals? Or would you want to be buried with a pot decorated by ‘Elbows Out’ or some other similarly named painter? 

Even the date assigned to be pot may be problematic. If the archaeological context is unknown, how do we know the date? Is it similar to another piece? Does that other piece have a secure archaeological context? No? So how do we obtain a date? Do we have to depend on a chronology based on supposed stylistic developments? How does this chronological framework link to known historical events, such as the Persian destruction levels at Athens? 

The Crosby Garrett helmet
displayed next to
the helmet from Ribchester
© David Gill

But the lack of secure archaeological contexts may hamper our knowledge of Roman objects. Take the Roman bronze cavalry helmet said to have been found at Crosby Garrett in Cumbria (north-west England) and then sold at auction in London. While we might assume that this was part of the equipment of a Roman cavalryman on the northern frontier of Britannia, it could be that the helmet was found, say, on the Danube frontier, but that at some point (in recent years) it was decided to say that it was found elsewhere. Archaeological investigations at the alleged findspot in Cumbria have yet to find conclusive evidence that the helmet was indeed found there. 

Lack of context can sometimes mean that scholars misinterpret objects. Take, for example, a fragmentary Greek marble funerary stele that was displayed in an exhibition in a high profile North American museum. It was suggested that the iconography pointed to a findspot in western Türkiye (Ionia). Yet the error of this assumption was confirmed when the lower part of the same stele was found in a rural cemetery in eastern Attica, Greece. 

Top part: stele fragment formerly in
New York private collection (and now repatriated)
Bottom part: excavated in a rural cemetery in eastern Attica

Archaeological context matters. Without it, archaeologists can struggle to make sense of the objects.

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Another Bubon Head Returns to Türkiye

Source: Manhattan DA

A bearded head from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (inv. 1971.51.2) has been returned to Türkiye [press release]. The head was included in Cornelius Vermeule's list of figures associated with Bubon (F). Mario A. del Chiaro dated it to the late third century CE, and noted that it came from Türkiye ("Western Asia Minor"). The press release added this information:

Bearded Head of a Man, dating to the 3rd century C.E., was looted from Bubon in 1966 and smuggled out by Turkish traffickers for Robert Hecht. The Bearded Head of a Man was ultimately sold by New York-based dealer Matthias Komor to a private collector, who donated the piece to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where it was seized by the ATU.

The press release noted that this was one of three Bubon associated pieces that were being returned to Türkiye. One was the Koutoulakis head in the J. Paul Getty Museum but the third is not identified. One possibility is that the third piece was one of two that passed through a Manhattan gallery in 2006 (Vermeule O and P).

These latest returns will place further pressure on the Cleveland Museum of Art to come to an amicable agreement over the statue once described as Marcus Aurelius (Vermeule D).

Reference

Del Chiaro, M. A. 1974. "New Acquisitions of Roman Sculpture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art." AJA 78: 68–70, pl. 20.

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