Further Returns to Türkiye

Septimius Severus. Source: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

It has been announced that the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen will be returning the bronze head of Septimius Severus to Türkiye ("The Glyptotek returns Roman bronze portrait to Türkiye", press release, November 26, 2024). It forms part of a series of imperial bronze statues from the sebasteion at Bubon: the press release notes Bubon returns from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fordham Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Shelby White Collection. The head was acquired from Robert Hecht.

This will put increased pressure on the Cleveland Museum of Art over the claims relating to the bronze "Marcus Aurelius" that has been linked in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art to Bubon (A. P. Kozloff, "Bubon: a re-assessment of the provenance," Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74 [1987] 130-43).

The announcement from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek includes 48 architectural terracottas linked to Düver, and also acquired from Hecht. This will put pressure on other museums in Europe, North America and beyond to return the Düver terracottas that they acquired.

Details of previous returns from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek can be found in David W. J. Gill, "The Returns from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen," in Artwashing the Past: Context Matters (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), 27–31.

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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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Statues from Bubon and Returns to Türkiye

Reconstruction of Statue Base from Bubon

The looting of the series of bronze imperial statues from the sebasteion at Bubon in Türkiye was shocking. Yet more than half a century on the authorities in Türkiye are achieving the gradual return of the statues, or parts of the statues, that were identified and discussed (among others) by Cornelius C. Vermeule and Arielle P. Kozloff. The display of the statues as originally intended will move a little closer.

The returns include statues of Lucius Verus, the possible leg of a statue of Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, as well as the head of a ruler, a woman, a bearded head, and the head of a youth.

Yet there appears to be active reluctance to accept that the draped man, once presented as Marcus Aurelius, did derive from this group. We also do not know what will happen to the statue in Houston. 

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Bronze kline returns to Türkiye

Source: J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum has decided to return bronze kline to Türkiye [press release]. This was acquired from Nikolas Koutoulakis in 1982.

The kline and other objects seemingly derived from Türkiye have been discussed elsewhere (Gill 2019).

It is even suggested that the bed or kline ‘probably entered the antiquities market as the result of illicit excavations’ (Baughan and Özgen 2012, 63). It may even coincide with a bronze bed that was reported to have been looted in 1979. Interestingly it was claimed that the bed had passed through the S. Schweitzer collection; such a collection was claimed for one of the pieces that the Getty has returned to Italy and it was noted that this may have been ‘a convenient way to launder recently surfaced antiquities’ (Gill and Chippindale 2007a, 216, 229, no. 23). A further report even suggested that the bed had been acquired by a Paris dealer in 1936, though there seems to be no authenticated documentation.

Why has it taken the Getty so long to resolve this dispute? What other objects in the collection will follow the kline back to Türkiye? 

References

Baughan, E. P., and I. Özgen. 2012. "A bronze kline from Lydia." AK 55: 63–87.

Gill, D. W. J. 2019. "Context matters: Nicolas Koutoulakis, the antiquities market and due diligence." Journal of Art Crime 22: 71–78.

Gill, D. W. J., and C. Chippindale. 2007. "From Malibu to Rome: further developments on the return of antiquities." International Journal of Cultural Property 14: 205-40.

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Attic Funerary Relief Returns to Greece

Sources: Hellas et Roma; Hellenic Ministry of Culture

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture has announced that part of a fourth century BCE Attic marble stele has been returned from an anonymous US private collection [Press Release]. The relief featured in an advertisement for the gallery Palladion Antike Kunst that appeared in the back of a 1982 exhibition catalogue produced by the Swiss-based organisation Hellas et Roma.  (The Ministry of Culture press release misleadingly suggests that the relief appeared in an exhibition catalogue implying that the stele was displayed.) A parallel for the stele was found at Kallithea in 1896; it marked the burial of Agnostrate daughter of Theodotos (Athens NM inv. 1863: cat. no. 417).

Christos Tsirogiannis has verified that images of the returning stele feature in the Becchina archive, and specifically to Nino Savoca, a dealer based in Munich. It appears that the stele first surfaced in the late 1970s. 

This stele forms part of a growing list of objects returned to Greece and Italy that had featured in the Becchina archive. Yet the Hellenic Ministry of Culture seems to be reluctant to seek the return of other objects that feature in this source, notably the Cycladic figure in the Leonard Stern collection (and currently on loan to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the pithos, probably from Rhodes, in the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. (The Italian authorities, likewise, do not seem to have requested the return of fragmentary wall-paintings in the J. Paul Getty Museum.) 

Source: Hellenic Ministry of Culture

The stele fragment was returned with two other items: a fragmentary 4th century BCE funerary stele, perhaps from Thessaly, showing a woman (next to a child; note the raised hand) who holds a box; and an hellenistic bronze male figure, perhaps of an athlete. 

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Another Bubon bronze head likely to be repatriated

It appears that a bronze head acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum from Nicolas Koutoulakis has been removed from display and appears to be returning to Türkiye (Adam Schrader, "The Getty Museum Returns an Ancient Bronze Head to Turkey", Artnet April 24, 2024). The head had featured in the Fire of Hephaistos exhibition (1996) no. 44: the find-spot was stated as "Reported to be from Ibecik (ancient Bubon in Lycia) in Turkey". Arielle Kozloff had earlier listed the statue among the Bubon pieces in The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art (1987).

This will put further pressure on the Cleveland Museum of Art in their attempt to disassociate a headless bronze statue from its suggested link with Bubon and its identification with the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Incidentally, the Cleveland statue was illustrated in the Fire of Hephaistos catalogue (cat. 54, fig. 2): "... possibly Marcus Aurelius ... Reported to be from Ibecik (ancient Bubon in Lycia)."

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The Stern Collection in New York: Cycladic or Cycladicising?

Courtesy of Christos Tsirogiannis

There appears to be excitement about the display of 161 Cycladicising objects at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (Nikolas Zois, "The Cyclades in New York City", ekathimerini.com January 26, 2024).

Doubts have already been raised by eminent archaeologist Christos Doumas that the collection contains modern creations. Have these concerns been addressed by those who have organised this display of ungrounded material?

Earlier this week a delegation from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture accepted the return of three items from the Michael C. Carlos Museum. Two of the pieces, a Minoan larnax and a funerary sculpture, were returned on the basis of their identification (by Christos Tsirogiannis) in the Becchina photographic archive. Yet Tsirogiannis has been able to identify at least one of the Stern figures in the same archive. 

At the same time five of the Stern figures are catalogued as part of the Keros haul. (The Hellenic authorities overlooked the Keros haul material at the Michael C. Carlos Museum even though they had taken action when the fragments were auctioned in London.)

It seems that some have not taken steps to learn about the material and intellectual consequences of collecting Cycladic figures. 

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The Carlos Museum: Time to Reflect?

The return of three antiquities acquired in 2002 and 2003 raise a number of issues for the curatorial team at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. The museum appears to overlook a number of 'facts' in the way that it has written about the return.

First, a Greek journalist, Nikolas Zirganos, raised the issue of three pieces back in 2007: two of the pieces are included in the return. 

Second, there was a suggestion that the Greek authorities had raised concerns about the three pieces at the time.

Third, the identifications had been made by Christos Tsirogiannis.

Fourth, discussion of these issues had been raised on social media and in an academic paper by 2009.

Yet, reading the Emory press statement you would never realise that concerns had been raised over such a long period of time. You could even have been forgiven for thinking that the road to repatriation had been researched by one of their own. Why did it take the museum so long to enter negotiations with the Greek authorities?

The link to the page listing the three objects does not give a complete picture of the owners / handlers of the three pieces. Indeed, there is no mention of the association of one of the items with Japan.

It would have been helpful if the museum had given the full (and correct) history of each of the pieces. And the suggestion that two of the pieces are associated with a particular dealer pointed to problems with the collecting history. Yet the third piece mentioned by Zirganos was linked to this same dealer: why has this been excluded from the agreement? Is it assumed that the full history had been disclosed?

How much of the supplied information is trustworthy? What is the basis of this knowledge? Is there supporting evidence?

What other pieces in the collection need to be investigated with the same level of rigour?

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Returns to Greece from Michael C. Carlos Museum

Some things take time. Back in 2007 Nikolas Zirganos wrote a story about three antiquities in the Michael C. Carlos Museum [see here]. The identifications had been made by Christos Tsirogiannis. 

Over the years the museum has released further snippets of information: e.g. the revised history for the larnax. 

It was announced today that as part of a cultural agreement between Emory University and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, three items would be returning to Greece:

a. Minoan larnax (inv. 2002.034.001). "The Carlos purchased the larnax from Robert Haber, New York in 2002. At the time of purchase, the museum believed the larnax to have been in the collection of Nicholas Koutoulakis (1910-1996) since the late 1960s."

b. Statue from funerary naiskos (inv. 2003.005.001). "The Carlos purchased the figure in 2003 from Michael Ward, New York. No provenance information was given by the dealer. "

c. Statue of a muse (formerly inv. 2002.031.001A/B). "Carlos purchased the sculpture in 2002 from New York-based dealer Robert Hecht (1919-2012), who stated he and partner George Zakos (1911-1983) had owned it since 1974."

It is puzzling that the pithos was not included in the return even though it appears in the Becchina archive (see here). It was said to have resided in the Goumaz collection and was sold to the Carlos by Phoenix Ancient Art. The pithos featured in the original Zirganos article.

Nor is there mention of the fragmentary Cycladic figures from the Keros haul. The Greek Government sought to stop their sale when they passed through an auction in London in 1990 for the benefit of Save the Elephants.

For more on the agreement: press release.

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