A fresco depicting Hercules and originally from Herculaneum, a city destroyed along with Pompeii by the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was back in Italy Monday, along with 59 other ancient pieces illegally trafficked to the United States.
Italy on Monday celebrated the return of 60 looted archaeological artefacts worth more than $20 million, many of which had been on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art before their illicit origin was discovered.
Among the more precious pieces Italian and U.S. officials displayed to journalists in Rome is a B.C. kylix, or shallow two-handled drinking vessel, some 2,600 years old.
The items, which U.S. authorities handed over to Italian counterparts in September, include “The Marble Head of Athena,” worth an estimated $3 million, and a fresco stolen from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city near Pompeii. The fresco, done in the classic style of Pompeiian art, depicts Hercules as a child strangling a snake.
Aside from their commercial value, the recovered artworks are of “priceless importance” for Italy’s historic, artistic and cultural identity, the head of the Carabinieri police art squad, General Vincenzo Molinese, said in a news conference.
In September, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had said the antiquities had been sold by convicted looters, and some had ended up in the collection of billionaire hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt.
Italy has long had a problem with the looting and smuggling of its artistic and archaeological heritage, but the Carabinieri insist they are becoming more effective in tracking down and recovering stolen art.
The returned pieces had been sold by art dealers, ended up in private U.S. collections and lacked documentation to prove they could be legally brought abroad from Italy.
Under a 1909 Italian law, archaeological objects excavated in Italy cannot leave the country without permission unless they were taken abroad before the law was made.
To showcase their efforts, a so-called Museum of Rescued Art was inaugurated last year in Rome, putting on display dozens of statues, jars, urns, plates and coins in a section of the Baths of Diocletian, once the Roman empire’s largest spa.
“For Italian antiquities alone we have executed 75 raids, recovered more than 500 priceless treasures valued at more than $55 million,″ Bogdanos said.
Italy has been a pioneer in retrieving illegally exported antiquities from museums and private collections abroad.
The country has been so successful in recovering such ancient artworks and artifacts that it created a museum for them. The Museum of Rescued Art was inaugurated in June in a cavernous structure that is part of Rome’s ancient Baths of Diocletian.
Italian cultural authorities are deciding whether to assign the latest returned pieces to museums near to where they were believed to have been excavated. Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano told reporters that another possibility is having a special exhibition of the returned pieces.
It’s not only Italy that loses pieces of its own history when artifacts are discovered in clandestine excavations and smuggled off to art dealers for profitable sales. Academic experts, deprived of valuable information about the context of the area where the objects were originally found, lose out on knowledge about past civilizations. (AP/Reuters)