Trafficking Looted Artifacts

Throughout history looted treasures have been smuggled across borders and sold to unscrupulous collectors and dealers, and yes, well known museums and galleries worldwide. There is barely a day that goes by that news of trafficking looted artifacts isn't a front page story. Below are just some of a few news stories of stolen artifacts.

Just recently in Bagdad Iraq's National Museum recovered 701 artifacts stolen in the wake of Saddam Hussein's ouster, raising hopes of restoring the nation's rich cultural heritage after five years of war.

Syrian authorities, who seized the looted treasures smuggled across the border, turned them over to the Iraqis, who carefully packed them in 17 boxes and flew them back to Baghdad on Saturday, said Muna Hassan, head of an Iraqi committee working to restore the artifacts.

Widespread looting in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities following Saddam's ouster in April 2003 depleted the Babylonian, Sumerian and Assyrian collections that chronicled some 7,000 years of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia.

Iraqi and world culture officials have struggled to retrieve the treasures with little success because of fears they could be lost again amid the rampant violence and the difficulties in documenting the extent of the damage.

Between 3,000 to 7,000 pieces are still believed missing, including about 40 to 50 that are considered to be of great historic importance, Laurent Levi-Strauss, chief of the section of museums and cultural objects at U.N. cultural body UNESCO, said last month.

The smuggling of stolen antiquities from Iraq's rich cultural heritage is allegedly helping finance Iraqi extremist groups, according to the U.S. investigator who led the initial probe into the looting of Baghdad's National Museum. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352775,00.html

In February this year a European trafficking ring was busted by the Italian police which led to the recovery of dozens of looted artifacts which included a first century fesco and ancient Greek pottery. Police said 31 people were under investigation.

Then police worked with local officials in Switzerland, France and Spain to retrieve the looted artifacts, many of which were illegally removed decades ago.

"These are all objects that had been excavated illegally from underground tombs and taken out of the country," Vito Augelli of the Italian police force that co-ordinated the operation, told reporters.

Among the recovered archeological treasures are vases from the Apulia region dating from fourth century B.C., goblets and other pottery imported from ancient Greece by the Etruscans in central Italy, and a fragment of a fresco believed to date to the first century A.D. and reportedly removed from a villa near Pompeii that served as a home to Emperor Nero's second wife, Poppaea Sabina.

During Italy's three-year hunt for those behind the antiquities-trafficking ring, a raid on a house in Milan also uncovered 22 paintings forged to look like the works of Renoir, Picasso, Modigliani, Monet and Degas, police said in a statement.

Italy has been aggressively pursuing antiquities illegally excavated from its territories, including high-profile campaigns seeking the return of artifacts that landed in prestigious collections of U.S. museums and galleries.

In mid-December 2007, officials opened the exhibit Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces to showcase the fruits of the past few years, with many of the featured antiquities items returned by California's J. Paul Getty Museum. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2008/02/19/italy-recover-artifacts.html

A Tangled Journey Home – On August 1, 2007, the Getty reached an agreement with Italy over a number of objects in the museum's collection that are strongly suspected of being looted. The Getty has pledged to repatriate 40 artifacts, including the statue of a cult goddess and the sculpture of two griffins attacking a doe, illustrated below. (The much-debated bronze statue of a victorious youth, also below, is still the subject of negotiations.) The following text has been updated from its originally published version to reflect recent developments. In this Q&A, archaeologist David Gill gives his perspective on the fate of classical antiquities in North American collections and the future of the twenty-first century museum.

Continue to visit www.archaeology.org for updates on this story, as well as the ongoing antiquities trafficking trials in Rome of Robert Hecht and former Getty curator Marion True.

Antiquities dealers Robert Hecht and Giacomo Medici should have tidied up their desks. Raids by the Italian police in 1995 and 2000 yielded a mountain of evidence--from photos of Greek and Roman artifacts still in the ground to Hecht's handwritten memoir--that showed exactly how the two had been trafficking looted antiquities through the international art market for decades ("Raiding the Tomb Raiders," July/August 2006). Their clients included, among others, three preeminent American cultural institutions: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.

Italy and Greece were simultaneously outraged and delighted with the news. Their long-standing suspicions were confirmed: artifacts recently acquired by major museums had been looted from their soil. And they jumped at the opportunity to get them back. Years of negotiations in the style of a Greek tragedy finally paid off and have resulted in some delicately worded agreements providing for repatriations and reciprocal long-term loans. The following pages showcase a handful of the artifacts that have been (or are slated to be) repatriated from the Met, the MFA, and the Getty, as well as pieces that the Getty only recently agreed to return. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and Toledo Museum of Art, among others, have also received official requests to return artifacts.

The recent wave of repatriations has led museums to scale back, if not cease, purchasing artifacts with questionable provenances, or ownership histories. This change in practice is welcome, but as David Gill, an archaeologist at the University of Swansea points out, "There is sadly little to celebrate over the return of these antiquities. [They] represent destroyed archaeological contexts, scientific knowledge lost forever; and even the best scholarship cannot retrieve this information." While the return of these objects may represent a victory of sorts over the illegal antiquities market, Gill insists that "energetic calls for the repatriation of antiquities, however justified, would be better spent in calling for the protection of archaeological sites."

Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, New York

Although the Met maintains that it acquired the artifacts in good faith, the museum has already transferred title of 21 objects to Italy's Ministry of Culture. So far, the Met has sent back four terracotta vessels and is planning to return the other objects over the next few years. As part of the 2006 agreement, the Ministry is allowing the Met to display the remaining pieces for a while longer to coincide with the opening of the museum's new Greek and Roman galleries. The museum also announced that, in return, the Ministry will provide the Met with future loans of up to four years each, per Italian law. Language in the agreement stipulates that the loans be "works of art of equivalent beauty and importance."

Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, Massachusetts

In 2005, Italian authorities submitted to the MFA a dossier of 42 artifacts in the museum's collection, 16 of which were linked with Robert Hecht. The dealer is thought to have sold or given the MFA more than 1,000 objects during his career (all of which are suspected of being looted). A year later, the MFA transferred title of 13 of the antiquities to Italy, which dispersed them to regional museums after a special exhibition in Rome. Unlike the Met, the MFA sent all 13 artifacts back right away. The Italian Ministry of Culture has pledged to develop future partnerships with the museum, including the loan of significant objects to the MFA. The first of those pieces, a spectacular marble statue of Eirene, goddess of peace, is now on display in Boston.

J. Paul Getty Museum
Malibu, California

A relatively young institution, the Getty has amassed an extensive collection in the past few decades by aggressively buying ancient art, a practice that left it with many objects of dubious provenance.

In 2005 the Italian government challenged the Getty on 52 objects in its collection, while Greek authorities renewed their campaign to repatriate four Getty acquisitions. The museum reached an agreement with Greece and returned the four objects last spring.

Negotiations between the Getty and Italy, however, have been more complicated. Last November, the Getty agreed to repatriate 26 of the 52 antiquities, but the museum refused to recognize Italy's claim to the bronze statue of a victorious youth (see below). The stalemate led to a breakdown in the negotiations--until recently.

On August 1, 2007, the Getty agreed to transfer to Italy 40 objects, which includes the 26 on which they had already agreed. They are in the process of working out a schedule for the return of the artifacts over next several months (with the exception of the statue of a cult goddess, below, which will remain on view at the Getty until 2010). http://www.archaeology.org/0709/etc/returns.html