Battling Over the Past (Part One)
The Owl
Vol. 2, Issue 7
February 14,
2008
Baltimore, Maryland
Dear Inquiring Traveler,
This week we hear from Paul Lewis who has been wondering about the growing number of empty shelves and display cases in prestigious centers of learning and culture in the New World. Why have some precious relics of a world gone by vanished from view at the Getty, the New York Met, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts?
Read on to find out what has happened and discover how the battle for the past is being waged.
Editor, The Owl
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Arguing over antiquities
by Paul Lewis
It is far from a torrent, but already a noticeable trickle. Slowly some of those ancient statues and art works that gave Greece its glory and Rome its grandeur are starting to flow back from the museums of America and Europe toward the countries where they were first installed.
In January, New York’s Metropolitan Museum announced it was sending 21 ancient treasures back to Italy, including the famous Euphronios Crater, a richly decorated jar used for mixing water and wine that had been on display in its halls for over 30 years. Last August the fabulously endowed Getty Museum in California said it was returning 40 art works to Italy and Greece, including a golden head wreath bought in 1993 for $1.15 million over which a curator was facing prosecution in an Athens court.
One side of the Euphronios Crater shows young
Athenians getting geared for battle.
Notice how the muscles in the arms and legs are
depicted —
this was perhaps the earliest painted attempt at anatomical accuracy.
Photo by Rolf Müller, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
An innovative potter Euphronios was a potter and painter of vases in Athens in the late 6th and early 5th centuries B.C. Part of what is now called the Pioneer Group, he is one of the earliest known artists and craftsmen in the western world. He particularly excelled in mythological scenes, and worked equally well on a massive scale as on smaller items. Some of his creations show his love of rendering the minutiae of daily life and a natural way of suggesting movement with detailed muscle lines. In his day, he introduced a number of technical and artistic innovations, including the use of a diluted clay slip which changed hue when the vessel was fired, opening up the color palette available to artists of the time. |
Another vase signed by Euphronios and attributed to
Euxitheos (potter),
is in the Louvre, Paris, and shows
Heracles wrestling with the giant Antaios.
Notice
those abs.
________________________________________
Then a rich American widow named Shelby White agreed to return 10 pieces from her late husband’s classical art collection under pressure from Greece and Italy—but only after securing a promise they would not come after any more. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts had already agreed to return 13 objects the previous year.
And there are many other recent examples of museums in America and Europe sending back treasures to their land of origin.
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Finders keepers
In all these cases, the ancient world was pitted against the new.
The governments of Italy and Greece—and other countries deprived of part of their past—were able to argue convincingly that the art works that they wanted back had been illegally excavated from archeological sites in their territory and smuggled out of the country. The thieves had then sold their finds to unscrupulous dealers who, in turn, sold them directly to museums—or to individuals who then left their collector’s pieces as bequests.
Behind closed doors
The negotiations with the museums are cloaked in secrecy. Art experts assume that the museums have settled with these foreign governments because they did not want the embarrassment of an open court case. That would have been too awkward, running the risk of showing that the museums had failed to inquire too closely into the origin of various busts, bricks or blocks for which they had often paid a great deal of money.
But who owns the past? And who will win the battle for its fragile remains?
Don’t miss next week’s issue of The Owl.
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