Looting Matters

The public display in Rome of the 5000 plus antiquities seized in Basel, Switzerland were a reminder of the scale of archaeological material surfacing on the market. The objects were seized alongside photographs and bundles of receipts. And so there are museums that will need to respond to the identification of material in their collections.

The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University was the subject of a report in 2007, followed by a request by the Greek authorities to return three items acquired in 2002 and 2004. Will the museum reveal the full collecting histories of the three pieces? Will they explain why the pieces are linked to the Basel archive?

Robert Jenrick, the Conservative MP for Newark, has decided to write a piece on the looting of antiquities in the Middle East for the Art Newspaper ("‘No one group has done more to put our heritage at risk than Islamic State’", 28 January 2015). He writes emotively about the sites that are being destroyed in Syria and Iraq:
this is a 21st-century crime being conducted purposefully, in full view and on social media. Those of who attended the meeting at the British Academy on this topic earlier this month were given an informed position, both by those making presentations and through contributions from the audience. It is not made clear how Jenrick conducted his research or obtained the information to assert:
Through systematic looting, these works of art are funding the murderous activities of IS. Indeed, these activities are now believed to be their third largest source of revenue, after oil and robbing banks. A brave network of informants, today’s “Monuments Men”, give us s…

In 2011 Fabio Isman reminded us of the likely impact of the Becchina archive. Palladion Antike Kunst handled material now in collections in Japan. These include:
Kamakura, Japanese collection. Attic black-figured amphora. Perhaps attributed to the Antimenes painter. Palladion (1976).Kurashiki Ninagawa Museum (no. 34). Attic red-figured cup attributed to Makron. Palladion (1976). This excludes material in the Miho Museum.

One of the museums that has not yet responded to the identifications in its collection is the Museo Arqueologico in Madrid [see earlier links]. The material has been discussed by Fabio Isman in The Art Newspaper and there he notes:
Becchina’s archive contains photographs of both sides of an Oriental-style Italic Amphora with a Wounded Deer from the seventh century BC, height 52cm, whose dimensions are clearly important enough to note down. The Madrid catalogue, showing a similar object, says of its provenance that “the location is unknown, making it difficult to ascribe it to a specific Italic workshop”. This orientalizing amphora is impressive (inv. 1999/99/159). Its condition suggests that it had been placed in an Italic tomb. So what was the collecting history before the amphora has handled by Becchina?

The curatorial staff need to be reviewing the 22 pieces that were identified by Isman as a matter of urgency. Becchina material could now be considered as "toxic" acquisi…

The 5000 or so antiquities revealed in Rome as a result of "Operation Teseo" were the stock of a Basel gallery. But the photographic dossier from the same source point to a series of major international museums that were buying from the same source. For now we can list the countries:

USASpainHollandEnglandJapan It is likely that more details will emerge over the next few weeks.

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I have had the privilege of seeing the new #Sappho poems but was sworn to secrecy!
— Bettany Hughes (@bettanyhughes) January 30, 2014
At the end of January 2014 Bettany Hughes commented that she had seen the new Sappho papyrus fragments. This was in preparation for her Sunday Times article that appeared on 2 February. In that piece it was claimed:
The elderly owner of our new Sappho papyrus wishes to remain anonymous, and its provenance is obscure (it was originally owned, it seems, by a high-ranking German officer), but he was determined its secrets should not die with him. Yet now Dirk Obbink has rejected this in an interview published on 23 January 2015.
Obbink characterized Hughes' story as a "fictionalization" and an "imaginative fantasy." Who is telling the truth here? Or have Hughes and Obbink both presented (perhaps unwittingly) separate 'fictionalised' accounts? What makes the collecting history presented by Obbink more trustworthy? What is th…

Christos Tsirogiannis and I have published "“A Fracture in Time”: A Cup Attributed to the Euaion Painter from the Bothmer Collection" that is now available in the latest number of the International Journal of Cultural Property 21, 4 (2014) [DOI]. IJCP is published by Cambridge University Press.

The paper considers the issue of "orphaned" figure-decorated pottery fragments.

Abstract
In February 2013 Christos Tsirogiannis linked a fragmentary Athenian red-figured cup from the collection formed by Dietrich von Bothmer, former chairman of Greek and Roman Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a tondo in the Villa Giulia, Rome. The Rome fragment was attributed to the Euaion painter. Bothmer had acquired several fragments attributed to this same painter, and some had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Other fragments from this hand were acquired by the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Princeton University Art …