Looting Matters

Over the last five years some 130 antiquities have been returned to Italy from North American public and private collections. We know that more than 130 antiquities were identified in those museums and private collections that co-operated with Italian authorities. In addition, several objects have been identified at auction houses and galleries in New York and London.

However there are still unresolved cases. One of the most pressing is the krater in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), in Europe Copenhagen and the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid have yet to sort out the claims against some of its objects, and the Miho Museum in Japan has been placed under pressure.

Over the next few months another European museum (or rather the private collectors behind it) will be shown to have acquired material that has been identified from the Polaroid archives.

LM will keep you informed of these developments.

Over the last few years there have been several instances from both sides of the Atlantic when auction houses and dealers have offered antiquities for sale that have been identified from images seized in police raids in Switzerland and Greece. The auction houses will no doubt claim, and indeed have claimed, that they have conducted an appropriate due diligence search. Yet it is clear that the procedures followed by the auction houses lack appropriate rigour. They rely on searching databases that will indicate objects stolen from recent collections but not items removed illicitly in recent years from archaeological contexts.

So how can auction houses and dealers avoid offering objects that have surfaced in recent years? Here are three suggestions:
a. Check and authenticate collecting histories (so-called "provenance"). Collecting histories can be fabricated so the paper trail needs to be researched with care.
b. Can the collecting history be traced back to the period prior to…

There has been an interesting debate about cultural property in the Daily Princetonian. This is particularly significant given the return of antiquities from the Princeton University Art Museum to Italy as well as the apparent Italian investigation into acquisitions derived from Edoardo Almagià.

Aaron Applbaum started the debate with a review of historic acquisitions ("Keep the artifacts as they are", April 12, 2001). The focus is on monuments such as the Parthenon marbles, although there is mention of more recent claims on Egyptian material in European collections. Applbaum resorts to the argument of precedent.
Essentially, returning these artifacts would be doubly detrimental: it would set a precedent that could lead to the liquidation of the collections of museums, and, by decentralizing these important artifacts, would leave the world culturally poorer. Returning artifacts would place them in geographical and cultural ghettos, whereby Greek sculptures could only be viewed…

Earlier this month antiquities were seized by the Carabinieri at the border between Italy and Switzerland (report, Il Mattino April 7, 2011). Apparently the objects, dating to the fourth century BC had been hidden in the boot of a car. The driver was Swiss-Italian, aged 43 years. His family came from Serino in Italy, just to the east of Naples. Paperwork was also seized.

The objects are listed:

5 clay amphorae with geometric patterns and figure-decorated scenes a clay container with geometric patterns a black-glossed clay juga clay egg-shaped objecta fishplate decorated with fish and shellfish3 pairs of gold and silver ear-ringsThe pieces appear to have been found in the region of Avellino and Salerno in southern Italy.
The house belonging to the man's father was searched and a number of Roman coins were recovered as well as a Spanish-made pistol. 

Papers from the Staffordshire Hoard Symposium (March 2010) are now available from the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) website.
A Symposium was held at the British Museum in March 2010. Twenty seven papers were delivered and there was much useful discussion. Summaries of many of the papers, together with some of the discussion and subsequent thoughts, will be added to this page over the next few months. In some cases, the embedded images have been processed to allow for a zooming image interface.

Dr Jerome Eisenberg has been talking about the sale of antiquities at TEFAF Maastricht 2011  ("Big-money still being spent on works of art despite world's traumas", The National March 24, 2011).
At Royal-Athena Galleries, the American antiquities dealer Jerome Eisenberg said business was good. Clients were buying Greek and Etruscan vases from the collection of Patricia Kluge (widow of the movie mogul John Kluge), he noted. "Right now a lot more interest is in the investment benefit because of the phenomenal prices in the auctions last year," he said. He said that new clients included a museum of ancient art in Mougins, France, and a private collector in an undisclosed Gulf state who bought €2.8m worth of vases in January. Interest was also high in Egyptian objects, said Eisenberg, pointing to a relief of Arsinoe II from the Ptolemaic period that he sold the first night of the fair for €52,600.The Kluge collection was discussed by Fabio Isman in the Italian press…

BBC Radio Scotland has broadcast an interview about the Lewis Chessmen. A local councillor, Norman A. MacDonald, from the island's Uig ward argues that some should remain on permanent display at Stornoway. He makes the point that Lewis was the final (archaeological) context. Interestingly the interviewer uses the "universal museum" point that more people would see the chessmen in London and Edinburgh ("given their importance").