Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Last month, the District Attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, announced that he had secured the return of $19 million worth of stolen antiquities to Italy.
Speaker: The month before that, he had announced the return of $5 million worth of antiquities to Turkey and $9 million to Lebanon.
Speaker: The month before that, $3.5 million to Italy.
Speaker: And before that, $1.25 million to Libya, $20 million to Greece, $725,000 to Yemen.
Speaker: Alvin Bragg is on the warpath, and he's not the only one.
Speaker: Across the Western world, the repatriation movement is in full swing.
Speaker: Centuries of questionable acquisitions of antiquities are finally being, well, questioned.
Speaker: And it's not just sketchy dealers and rarefied collectors.
Speaker: Major prestigious museums are feeling enormous legal and social pressure to examine their holdings and return what rightfully belongs elsewhere.
Speaker: But, of course, this raises the question, what does rightfully belong elsewhere?
Speaker: And I'll be honest, for me, the answer can sometimes seem very uncertain.
Speaker: Looting is bad, obviously, but scholarship and conservation are good.
Speaker: And sometimes major museums far from where these objects originated are pretty well equipped to do that.
Speaker: Colonial exploitation is bad, but what about legitimate trade and legal artifacts?
Speaker: And is there something to be said for the millions of people who visit the world's great museums and can see objects there versus the tiny number who are able to travel to see them in their sometimes very remote places of origin?
Speaker: And as I'm talking, I know some of you are already having arguments in your head, and that is great.
Speaker: It's a subject which is as sensitive and provocative as it is important.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Today on Curious Objects, we are going to take the bull by the horns.
Speaker: Or more to the point, we're going to take the jug by the handles.
Speaker: Our curious object for today is the Sarpedon crater, also known as the Euphronius crater.
Speaker: That's crater with a K.
Speaker: We'll get into what that means.
Speaker: But this is a colossal classical Greek two-handled bull from around 515 BC.
Speaker: If you've seen a copy of the Iliad translated by Robert Fagles, you've probably seen this piece before.
Speaker: The cover of that book is illustrated with the painting from this piece.
Speaker: Everyone agrees it's an incredibly important object, but what's been harder to agree on is where it belongs.
Speaker: And for decades, one of the world's greatest museums was completely fooled about where this thing actually came from.
Speaker: Today, we are going to pull apart the story of this masterpiece from its ancient Greek origins to its excavation and rediscovery, the very juicy investigations around it and the controversial negotiations between people from museums and national governments and law enforcement, where the piece ended up today and whether that decision was the right one.
Speaker: And I'm delighted to have the chance to do all that together with a brilliant young antiquities specialist, Lillian Bartlett Stoner.
Speaker: Lillie lives and breathes antiquities.
Speaker: She studied the subject at Harvard and NYU.
Speaker: She's worked at the Metropolitan Museum and the Boston MFA.
Speaker: She advises collectors and museums around the world.
Speaker: And Lillie, I'm thrilled to welcome you to Curious Objects.
Speaker: Well, thanks so much for having me, Ben.
Speaker: I'm a big fan.
Speaker: Okay, I have some rapid fire questions for you.
Speaker: Are you game?
Speaker: I'm game.
Speaker: I'm ready.
Speaker: What is the most sexually perverted work of art at the Metropolitan Museum?
Speaker: Oh my god.
Speaker: Ancient?
Speaker: Well, that's what you know best, but if you have something else in mind, bring it on.
Speaker: Sorry, Mom.
Speaker: Sorry, Dad.
Speaker: I think I would have to say something.
Speaker: It's colloquially known as the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and it is an Egyptian work where a woman is reclining, sort of, and an enormous phallus is being inserted into her by dwarves.
Speaker: Okay, that's pretty scandalous.
Speaker: All right, you've been exiled forever to a desert island.
Speaker: What object are you bringing with you?
Speaker: And is it Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?
Speaker: No, I mean, I don't need to look at that every day.
Speaker: I would take a cameo in Vienna.
Speaker: It's sardonic.
Speaker: It's beautiful.
Speaker: It's a little bigger than pocket size, purse size, perhaps.
Speaker: And it celebrates the incestuous power couple Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II.
Speaker: And I suspect it's never been buried.
Speaker: And I just want to touch it every day.
Speaker: You still managed to get a little sexual impropriety in there.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe I guess they did have offspring.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: I'll stay away from that.
Speaker: What is the first object that you remember falling in love with?
Speaker: Oh, actually, yeah.
Speaker: I was about 17.
Speaker: I traveled to Europe for the first time.
Speaker: I was at the Louvre.
Speaker: And I walked into that great gallery with the huge painting of Napoleon crowning himself by David.
Speaker: And I was blown away.
Speaker: I couldn't care.
Speaker: That's about the Mona Lisa, but the detail there and still love it.
Speaker: You have been banned from your current field.
Speaker: You have to pick a new specialty.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: I'd like to be a lawyer.
Speaker: I'd like to legitimize my argumentative streak, and I think I'd like to change some current laws affecting antiquities.
Speaker: So you're going to take a short hop from antiquities specialist to antiquities legal specialist.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right, what movie has to you the most interesting depiction of material culture?
Speaker: I don't know about interesting, but I would say definitely Gladiator.
Speaker: You can fight me on this.
Speaker: There's so much good stuff, some not so good stuff, but what a movie.
Speaker: I think also Hans Zimmer, genius.
Speaker: I think it's fair to say that Russell Crowe's abs count as an example of material culture.
Speaker: Okay, what lost object would you most like to discover?
Speaker: There's so many lost objects.
Speaker: You can't find them all, but maybe you can find one.
Speaker: Okay, I mean, Alexander the Great's funeral purse.
Speaker: Tell me about that.
Speaker: So they had to bring him back from Babylon to be buried.
Speaker: The hearse was diverted by Ptolemy the Great, Ptolemy who made himself the king of Egypt.
Speaker: And yeah, but it was a massive thing described as, you know, ivory gold.
Speaker: I mean, it certainly doesn't survive, but that I would like to see.
Speaker: All right, I'm sold.
Speaker: I'll start looking tomorrow.
Speaker: Start looking.
Speaker: What's one misconception that people have around antiquities that you'd like to correct?
Speaker: Oh, um...
Speaker: Well, I think people think classical art is all boring white sculpture, some of it nude, and orangey squirrely little vases full of obscure myths.
Speaker: And in reality, it's hilarious.
Speaker: It's aesthetically and technically, I think, totally brilliant.
Speaker: And it's frequently raunchy.
Speaker: As you've already demonstrated for us.
Speaker: That can continue to demonstrate.
Speaker: I'm sure you will.
Speaker: On the other hand, what would you say is the most overrated classical work of art?
Speaker: I think there's some Roman marbles, copies of Greek originals that are so-so.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think we're missing a lot of the good stuff.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The capital on Venus, for instance, overrated.
Speaker: Shots fired.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Take that.
Speaker: What's one book that you would recommend an amateur read to start to understand your field?
Speaker: This is an easy one.
Speaker: It's my favorite, published in the 70s.
Speaker: It's Martin Robertson's Greek art.
Speaker: It's in two volumes by this great Oxford Don.
Speaker: And it's just beautiful, gentle British prose.
Speaker: And it brings it all together.
Speaker: The illustrations are really crappy, black and white, tiny.
Speaker: But if that bothers you, then Google them.
Speaker: I think it's a wonderful resource.
Speaker: What's the coolest art discovery or decorative arts discovery that you've made?
Speaker: Not really sure, but I would say I loved excavating in grad school.
Speaker: I did it for about 10 seasons.
Speaker: And I think my favorite summer, I was excavating a late Roman, super luxurious, totally fallen apart, colonnaded street in Turkey.
Speaker: and discovered some fun things.
Speaker: The second story had a mosaic floor, it had marble columns, it had glass windows, and it had a toilet.
Speaker: A toilet?
Speaker: A toilet, yes.
Speaker: And there was this unassuming clay downspout.
Speaker: And an Oxford researcher who happened to be in the area analyzed it and found that it did indeed have incrustations of ancient urine.
Speaker: That guy was quite a character.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I just loved how it all came together.
Speaker: So fire maybe caused an earthquake and then this men sort of structure collapsed upon itself and just sifting through stratigraphically is just so satisfying and so fun.
Speaker: What was the last object or artwork that you saw that gave you shivers?
Speaker: You know, it was a month ago at the National Museum in Athens, and I'd never seen it before.
Speaker: It was it's this Mycenaean gold foil scale, and it was found in a child's grave in Mycenae.
Speaker: And it had all these kind of wafer-thin little medallions, each decorated with a butterfly.
Speaker: And so usually in Greek art, a butterfly is a symbol of the soul.
Speaker: And so the idea is this was probably related to the psychostasia, the weighing of souls after death.
Speaker: And I just found it so incredibly moving.
Speaker: We don't know so much about ancient religion.
Speaker: And that really got me.
Speaker: Okay, well, we'll be right back to talk with Lily about the Euphronius crater.
Speaker: First, just a reminder that we've posted pictures of this magnificent object at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: You can find me on Instagram at Objective Interest and Lily at Lily Agoria, that's L-I-L-Y underscore A-G-O-R-A-I-A, where she posts in
Speaker: I love this series where she associates popular songs and musical compositions with works of antique art.
Speaker: It's so much fun.
Speaker: Check her out there.
Speaker: You can also email me with your comments or suggestions for Curious Objects episodes at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: If you're enjoying this episode, do me a favor and hit the pause button.
Speaker: I promise we'll be here when you come back and then hit the write a review button.
Speaker: Just give us a few words about what you like about Curious Objects.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be anything fancy.
Speaker: Every single review and rating is a huge help for me in bringing more listeners to the show and helping me to entice fantastic guests like Lily to take the time to talk with us.
Speaker: And now that we're putting out weekly episodes every single Wednesday, which I hope you're enjoying, by the way, those ratings and reviews make even more of a difference.
Speaker: I am so grateful to all of you who have supported the show in that way.
Speaker: And please keep it coming.
Speaker: Okay, so Lily, let's talk about the Euphronius crater.
Speaker: And before we get into just how important and influential this piece is, tell me, what is a crater anyway, and how is it used?
Speaker: Oh yes, okay.
Speaker: So, vases are my favorite.
Speaker: They're technically so ingenious shape-wise, and if you've ever tried to make a little clay pot, you know how hard they are to do.
Speaker: Mine are always sort of lopsided turds, and each shape is made for a very precise purpose.
Speaker: um craters were really the focal point of the symposium this all-male gathering a drinking party um that took place in the andron a man cave if you like in a greek house um so couches were set up around the perimeter of this room and the crater would have been smack in the center of the room that all-important vessel that contained wine diluted with water
Speaker: And it's a great fun thing because the host got to pick the dilution of water to wine.
Speaker: So if they wanted sort of a wilder party, they would have less water.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So this is like, you know, vodka versus wine.
Speaker: Well, yeah, and we don't know quite how strong wine was when it was undiluted, but I have a feeling it was significantly stronger than the sort of 12-14% we have today.
Speaker: So I described this piece as colossal, but tell us just how big is it?
Speaker: Well, it's a big boy.
Speaker: I looked up the dimensions today.
Speaker: It's nearly half a meter tall, and the rim is even wider, 55 centimeters.
Speaker: and it would have held something like 45 liters of wine so just uh the scholarly comparison um your standard keg holds 50 liters so wow it's big okay so and it's decorated with painted scenes on both sides what are those scenes yeah so i had to give a little just little
Speaker: a little bit of a talk about how, what painting on basis really means, because it's sort of a misnomer.
Speaker: This one's painted in the red figure technique, but nothing was really painted.
Speaker: Instead, painters were using a dilute solution of clay, which was called a slip, sort of a suspension.
Speaker: And it was basically invisible ink.
Speaker: So they would, everything that they wanted to be black on this crater,
Speaker: they would paint with a very fine brush this invisible ink.
Speaker: So each beautiful body would be sort of outlined, all the anatomical details would be rendered in on this wet clay, still unfired.
Speaker: And the background itself would have been completely washed with this slip.
Speaker: And so then it went into the kiln and was fired several times with several different levels of oxygenation.
Speaker: And voila, the parts of the dilute slip would turn black and the rest would be left that gorgeous clay color, the red.
Speaker: So it's incredible the detail that they were able to manage basically by not even seeing what they were doing or.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that really puts this in context, especially when listeners look at these images, I think they'll find that incredibly impressive.
Speaker: So with that technique, what did the artist behind this crater actually depict?
Speaker: So he's on the obverse, that big front side, the most famous piece.
Speaker: He's showing the body of Sarpedon, who's this half mortal, fortunately two mortal, son of Zeus, that great big oversized body.
Speaker: And he had just been killed by Patroclus in the Trojan War.
Speaker: And so you can see he's stretched out, he's overlarge.
Speaker: If he stood up, his head would go right out of that frame.
Speaker: And he's, other than these wounds that have been added, you can see them in added red paint, paint that is, he's beautiful and his body is displayed as such.
Speaker: Every hair is in place.
Speaker: His face is serene.
Speaker: His eyelashes are gorgeous as well.
Speaker: And to his
Speaker: Right and left, those winged figures are Hypnos and Thanatos, so sleep and death.
Speaker: And they're carrying him off the battlefield.
Speaker: And then standing right behind him is Hermes.
Speaker: And this is Hermes' psychopompus.
Speaker: So Hermes, the escorter of the soul.
Speaker: So he's going to take Sarpedon to the underworld, as it were.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this explains why it's called the Sarpedon crater, but we've also referred to it as the Euphronius crater.
Speaker: What does that mean?
Speaker: Well...
Speaker: Athenian painters and potters were not short on ego.
Speaker: They didn't always sign their works, but Euphronius in this case did.
Speaker: He signed it Euphronius a Grabson.
Speaker: Euphronius made this.
Speaker: And his painting style, even if he didn't sign it, is so distinctive that real experts are able to attribute his work even when he doesn't sign.
Speaker: How significant would you say this piece is amongst the universe of ancient Greek artifacts?
Speaker: I mean, I think Euphronius is one of the
Speaker: Attic painters was one of the top.
Speaker: He was one of the pioneer group who sort of really was innovative in making things more naturalistic.
Speaker: So I think it's important art historically.
Speaker: But it's one of the many, many, many gorgeously rendered vases around.
Speaker: I would also point out that these terracotta vases were not necessarily so valuable in antiquity at all.
Speaker: the real super rich got metal vessels.
Speaker: So the big Tegara items were bronze and especially silver and gold.
Speaker: And it's thought by some people that the aesthetics of these silver and gold, specifically tarnished silver and gold, might have been the inspiration for the black and red figure terracotta examples.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: So these were not, yeah, they're not like high works of art necessarily.
Speaker: Obviously, they were valued and cherished.
Speaker: So it's a great example.
Speaker: And although it's not intact, it was found in fragments and restored.
Speaker: It's, I think, virtually complete, which is also unusual.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm really excited to get to this excavation process and how that all went down.
Speaker: So the object really has been all over the place.
Speaker: And geography is such a crucial part of the story that we're exploring today.
Speaker: And just to be clear, we've described this piece as Greek, but it wasn't actually found in Greece, was it?
Speaker: No, it wasn't.
Speaker: It's one of these strange, strange things about Greek phases, most of them.
Speaker: most of the ones that are in good shape other than Lekithoi have been found outside of Greece and they've been found in southern Italy and Etruria and Sicily.
Speaker: And one of the reasons for that is thought to be that they were balanced for ships.
Speaker: So the ships would go, they were going to buy grain from sort of the bread baskets of the Mediterranean.
Speaker: And these would be sort of balanced to take one way.
Speaker: and then the grain would come back.
Speaker: So I think light bulbs might already be starting to appear for some listeners because now we're talking about an object made by Greeks.
Speaker: But in this period, the Greeks were actually not only trading, but also colonizing in Italy and across the Mediterranean.
Speaker: And this is, of course, is a different category of colonization from what we typically think about these days.
Speaker: When we think about repatriation, often we're thinking about colonizers returning things to their former colonies, Europeans who established colonies across Africa and Asia and the Americas.
Speaker: And here it's a little different, but the context is super important.
Speaker: So let's try to get to the bottom of this.
Speaker: So what do we know about when this piece was excavated and who did it?
Speaker: Okay, so depends who you ask, but it's conventionally accepted that it was looted illegally by local tomb raiders in 1971, and from Cervetteri, which is north of Rome, it's in Tuscany.
Speaker: And then it came into the possession of Giacomo Medici, who was sort of a runner between these Tomberoli and dealers, and later Bob Hecht, who was an art dealer.
Speaker: And where did it go from there?
Speaker: Well, it passed through Switzerland, as many things did in the 1970s, where it was restored in Zurich.
Speaker: And then it was sold to the Met in 1972.
Speaker: for a million dollars, as I recall.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: As you mentioned, it's quite an extraordinary price, certainly in the 1970s.
Speaker: And it was so extraordinary at the time, yeah.
Speaker: And of course, immediately the price raised all sorts of concerns and rumors and a lot of attention almost immediately.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when they bought this piece in 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, did they have reason to believe that it might have been looted?
Speaker: What did they think or what was the plausible or ostensible story for its provenance?
Speaker: Well, I think...
Speaker: Let's start off honestly.
Speaker: I'm not sure how concerned museums were in the early 1970s with provenance.
Speaker: It was a very different climate and due diligence wasn't what it was today.
Speaker: However, Bob Het, the dealer who sold it to them, provided at the time documentation that he had acquired it from a Lebanese dealer, Mr. Sarafian, and he provided documentation that Sarafian's father had acquired it in 1920.
Speaker: He gave all sorts of banking information showing how the money had passed hands.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: There were rumors right from the beginning.
Speaker: It attracted a lot of press attention.
Speaker: And Tom Hoving, the director in the 70s, after he retired, referred to it as the hot pot.
Speaker: He has a lot of one-liners, but in any case.
Speaker: And I love that Bob Hecht claimed that he was taking a 10% commission on this sale from the Lebanese collector you mentioned, Sorok.
Speaker: And as we'll get to in just a minute, turns out that was a slight understatement of what his margin was on that piece.
Speaker: And again, I mean, the Met, I think it's very easy to point fingers now.
Speaker: But I think they did.
Speaker: They were sending their legal team to investigate and try to get more documentation on this.
Speaker: Yeah, so things at this point got really wild, right?
Speaker: Because so the Met, they sent, you know, a private detective to Zurich and they sent lawyers to Beirut to talk with Seraphion.
Speaker: And it seemed like they were turning up evidence disproving that the piece had been illegally excavated and supporting the story that it had been in Lebanon.
Speaker: And so... Yeah, in a hat box.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: And so that's basically how things stood for another 20 years, right?
Speaker: Yeah, yes.
Speaker: And really, when the Italians began to really systematically investigate Giacomo Medici, again, this runner, when they raided his warehouse, they found photos of him posing next to the Euphonius crater at the Met.
Speaker: kind of grinning and another of Bob Peck doing the same.
Speaker: And they slowly started to unravel this relationship.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: These are not the Italian police we're talking about.
Speaker: These are not your ordinary beat cops.
Speaker: This is the Carbonieri.
Speaker: The semi-military police force with fancy uniforms riding on their horses.
Speaker: Gorgeous uniforms.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And they have the most sophisticated art crime, you know,
Speaker: And anywhere, are quite a unit anywhere and are quite pragmatic people, I will say.
Speaker: So they found in their investigation into Medici and subsequently into Bob Hecht that in fact, Hecht had not bought this from this Lebanese dealer, Serafian, but from Medici for, drumroll, $350,000.
Speaker: So he was taking a very, very healthy profit when he sold this thing to the Metropolitan Museum.
Speaker: And in turn, it seemed that Medici had bought this piece from Tomb Raiders for $88,000.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So everybody was getting their healthy markup in here.
Speaker: Have I got this all right so far?
Speaker: You have, although you missed the very weird part where they raided Hecht's Paris home and found this handwritten personal memoir describing two ways how you acquired the crater.
Speaker: On the one hand from Medici and on the other one from Seraphion.
Speaker: So again, it's all sort of weird and circumstantial, even now.
Speaker: So he was essentially keeping two sets of books.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it's interesting, you know, and maybe we can talk about this later.
Speaker: I mean, it's very, they're good dealers and bad dealers and they're a set of bad dealers, especially now in the seventies and eighties that were, they were probably doing, they were buying in the legitimate trade and they, they were buying from Tom Baroli.
Speaker: Right from the source.
Speaker: But I think it's very dangerous just to dam an object because they're connected to one of these dealers.
Speaker: I think there has to be a much more sensitive approach.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: When did making plans get this complicated?
Speaker: It's time to streamline with WhatsApp.
Speaker: The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together.
Speaker: Use polls to settle dinner plans.
Speaker: Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th.
Speaker: And never miss a meme or milestone.
Speaker: All protected with end-to-end encryption.
Speaker: It's time for WhatsApp.
Speaker: Message privately with everyone.
Speaker: Learn more at whatsapp.com.
Speaker: Yeah, well, and I think it's so important to take these matters on a case-by-case basis, which is why we're talking about a specific object and not this sort of... We'll get to some of the broad philosophical arguments, but I think it's really important to ground it in actual facts or facts to the degree that we can determine what they are.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: At this stage in the 1990s, the Carbigneri have done their investigation.
Speaker: They've turned out all of these damning and suspicious, if not outright disqualifying details about Hecht's operation.
Speaker: So Bob Hecht is unmasked, so to speak.
Speaker: And this now leaves the Metropolitan Museum with a tough decision to make.
Speaker: Because they had fairly convincing evidence that one of the most important ancient Greek pieces in their collection, which they had owned at this point for over 20 years, 25 years, that this piece had been illegally excavated and looted.
Speaker: And obviously the Italians wanted their piece returned.
Speaker: And so before you tell us what actually happened from there, I'm curious, you know, if you were in the shoes of the director of the Metropolitan Museum at this point, and I know this is an impossible hypothetical because of all of the factors they have to consider, but just from a sort of gut intuitive perspective, what do you think you would have done?
Speaker: I think
Speaker: Felipe Montebello had a horribly difficult decision to make.
Speaker: I think it probably broke his heart.
Speaker: I think it probably broke Carlos Picón's heart.
Speaker: I think the evidence still was circumstantial enough that they felt...
Speaker: weird, but the press was so bad and the evidence was damning enough that I think he had to do it.
Speaker: And I think I probably would have done the same thing, even though I think it should have stayed at the Met for various reasons.
Speaker: So what did they ultimately agree to do?
Speaker: Well, I think the agreement was
Speaker: was not a bad one.
Speaker: So in 2006, they agreed that the crater would be returned and in exchange for the next 40 years, Italian works of equivalent artistic significance are given on loan to the Met for four year periods.
Speaker: And that's a great thing, actually, these bilateral loans.
Speaker: I think that's a very positive development.
Speaker: I wish it happened more.
Speaker: And so where exactly did the Euphronius crater end up?
Speaker: Well, it had a big splashy homecoming, uh, nostos.
Speaker: And when it was first returned in 2006 with about 20 other pieces, um, it was a very sentimental thing for the Italians and a very well attended homecoming in Rome.
Speaker: Then it went to the Villa Giulia, a museum for Etruscan art, also in Rome, for a period.
Speaker: And now it is in a tiny museum in Trivetri, the site that it was likely looted from.
Speaker: And do you think that the return of an artifact like this one tends to drive more people to visit its new home, or in this case, I guess, its very old home?
Speaker: I think it's case by case.
Speaker: I think in this case, no.
Speaker: I've read figures that it's about 12,000 people visit Chigaturi every year.
Speaker: And the crater is on the second floor, so one has to sort of make an effort to get up there.
Speaker: It doesn't look terribly well lit to me in the photos that I've seen of the installation, although I haven't visited it since it's been there.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: I would have preferred that at least it had remained in Villa Giulia, in Rome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, certainly many more people would have seen it at the Met.
Speaker: More people would have seen it in Rome than see it at this little archeological museum of Cerbiteri, which, you know, to be clear, this is a, as you've described, is quite a small museum an hour outside of Rome.
Speaker: And so is it fair to say that something has been lost as a result?
Speaker: I think I think access is a really important thing.
Speaker: And I think that's why museums, that's that's why they exist.
Speaker: Now, at least it is available to be seen by the public.
Speaker: It's not stuck in the storeroom.
Speaker: That's another fear that I have when things are repatriated, that they'll never be seen again.
Speaker: So I don't think any knowledge is lost, but I do think accessibility has been greatly decreased.
Speaker: Now, I'm curious, the piece was looted originally from Italy, but as we've discussed, even before that, it was a Greek object and a singular artifact of the achievement of Greek culture and of this great Greek artist, Euphronios.
Speaker: Was there ever any thought that it should actually go back to Greece instead of Italy?
Speaker: Not that I know of.
Speaker: Maybe they should have a go at it.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it hadn't been legally exported, so I guess that would be the main... Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I guess the statute of limitations has run out.
Speaker: On the exportation of this piece in 515 BC?
Speaker: Yes, I think so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the Greeks may have lost their legal claim.
Speaker: But I wonder, I mean, we talk so much these days about repatriation for cultural and social reasons, even more so than legal reasons, even when pieces may have been exported legally.
Speaker: their native countries sometimes still feel that they have a moral claim to those objects.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In that context, it's a little surprising to me that a piece like this hasn't been the object of Greek interest.
Speaker: It is a bit surprising.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, they, I hate to say that a museum is saturated, but if you go to the storerooms of most museums in Greece, they don't have room.
Speaker: I mean, so I would understand a sentimental argument, but I think, I think logistically and it wouldn't make too much sense for them.
Speaker: So, I mean, today to export an important antiquity or an important work of art from a country, you generally have to get a license or an export permit.
Speaker: But of course, that's a recent development for most of history that trade was largely unregulated.
Speaker: So let's imagine instead of having been looted, this piece had been legally exported, say, in the early 19th century, which now we're describing a scenario that's a little bit closer to the famous debate over the Elgin marbles or the Parthenon marbles.
Speaker: But in that scenario, how might you think about its rightful home?
Speaker: I imagine surely it would still be at the Met in that case.
Speaker: I think absolutely it would, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do you think that legality of the transaction really makes a fundamental difference to the rightful home of an object of that significance?
Speaker: It's tough as an American, right?
Speaker: I mean, I don't feel that it necessarily adds anything to the object if it's nearer to its place of manufacture.
Speaker: I just don't.
Speaker: But if I were Greek or Italian, I might feel very, very differently.
Speaker: So it's a hard one.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What's your take on it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I have to say, I share your instinct about that.
Speaker: I'm a dealer.
Speaker: And so my basic assumption is that works of art are made for consumption and that consumption is part of an economic context and an economic exchange.
Speaker: And I know that for some people that economic element can feel dirty.
Speaker: It can feel profane.
Speaker: And for me, it doesn't really.
Speaker: Well, having worked as a dealer for five years myself, I share your opinion, but I do think that the massive prices that antiquities started to fetch in the 70s, 80s, 90s, they really did make looting a problem.
Speaker: So in that sense, I think that drove commerce, and now here we are with this repatriation sort of...
Speaker: Yeah, and to be clear, I'm not advocating for a sort of laissez-faire, unregulated, you know, go loot whatever you want kind of scenario.
Speaker: I do think that, you know, regulations and protections are critical and that national governments do have at least the legal right to oversee the kinds of commerce that are done within their borders.
Speaker: That being said, I think from a from the sort of moral perspective, I feel that if the laws have been complied with and if the legitimate democratic government of a country has decided that a certain kind of transaction is permissible.
Speaker: I can't really find any basis to complain about that.
Speaker: Yeah, I quite agree.
Speaker: I think my biggest concern now is that the sort of the atmosphere right now, especially in New York for antiquities, but the U.S., Germany also, Switzerland to some extent, this kind of dogmatic response
Speaker: drive for repatriation actually coming from the da's office and you quoted you quoted um um those figures earlier yeah yeah yeah and so i'm more familiar with the sound bites of bogdano's um but he is yeah he's the ada he's made a special art art crime unit in new york and
Speaker: They are actually the ones instigating these repatriations.
Speaker: And I do wonder, first of all, what his endgame is.
Speaker: And I also wonder what's going to happen to these great old collections that now things can never go.
Speaker: They can never enter the legitimate trade.
Speaker: Or if they can, they can do so very quietly.
Speaker: and they can never be requested to museums which is what these collectors had in mind to begin with and I think that is a tragedy because all of this information will be lost
Speaker: Within a generation.
Speaker: Well, and I think that, you know, one factor that is so often overlooked is, you know, it's easy to say that all of these pieces ought to belong in museums and that ideally they should be in the museums closest to their original homes and that to some moral intuition that that can feel right.
Speaker: But yeah, yeah.
Speaker: The reality is that interest in these objects isn't self-propagating.
Speaker: It requires maintenance, it requires enthusiasm, and it requires resources.
Speaker: And generally speaking, the people who provide that enthusiasm and those resources...
Speaker: Well, the collectors are a huge part of that.
Speaker: The people who endow the museum positions to study these pieces and who fund the museum wings to display them, not to mention the people who, of course, keep the gears of commerce churning in terms of the private market.
Speaker: And I do have a concern that if those people who are, you know, easy to demonize, but if those people feel boxed out of the market to the point that they can't really have any fun participating in it anymore, that can have some pretty serious knock on effects in terms of the legitimate study and interest that the public can maintain in these really important objects.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And, you know, I think I think collectors get a very bad rap.
Speaker: I think most have, especially in my field, probably your field, too.
Speaker: They're not it's not contemporary art.
Speaker: There's no they're not investments as much as as those things.
Speaker: And I think I think there's a true love and appreciation for these objects.
Speaker: They're almost putting their money where their mouths are.
Speaker: I had one collector friend, and I'll paraphrase because I don't quite remember what exactly she said, but about looting, she's like, Jesus, I'd rather, I would no more want to see the head of my favorite statue in my living room than I would like to see the head of my favorite person chopped off and in my living room.
Speaker: And I
Speaker: Horrendous.
Speaker: And I think another aspect about this kind of loss of knowledge and the current paranoia, and it goes in the scholarly academic route too.
Speaker: So a lot of scholarly journals will not publish
Speaker: artworks that are in private collections they won't publish things without a provenance before 1970 so not only these things cannot be seen in museums they're just lost the knowledge of them will just disappear and I had a professor in grad school who said he would never enter the house of someone who collected antiquities
Speaker: Even though, I mean, my entire scholarship was paid by a famous collector of antiquities, and it was insane.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: There's a lot of hypocrisy.
Speaker: A lot of biting the hand that feeds you, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But fear also on the term.
Speaker: Academics want to keep their digs.
Speaker: They want to keep the host countries happy.
Speaker: But I do fear that lost knowledge, I think, more than anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And again, I don't want people to get the impression that we're sort of, you know, weeping over the poor fate of these wealthy independent collectors.
Speaker: You know, they're going to be fine.
Speaker: But the concern really is is about the material and the role that these people inevitably play and have for all of human history since the very first patrons who purchased pieces like this in 500 B.C.
Speaker: You know, the
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That economic exchange has always driven the value, not just the financial value, but the cultural and social value of these works of art.
Speaker: And I feel there is a risk of overcorrection against that reality.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's what's happening now.
Speaker: And I hope it swings back the other way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, before we go, I just, and I know we can do a whole episode or a series of episodes about this, but I have to ask you about the most famous repatriation controversy in the world, the Elgin Marbles or the Parthenon Marbles.
Speaker: So give me the CliffsNote version on this.
Speaker: First of all, what do you call them?
Speaker: I call them the Elgin Marbles.
Speaker: And do you think they should be returned?
Speaker: Ah, well, I have to say that they were legally exported under the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker: And I think the Brits actually did pretty good service in getting them out there when they did right before the whole east side of the Parthenon blew up and the rest of the things were sort of polluted beyond repair.
Speaker: That said, having recently visited Athens, they've done such a beautiful job with the Acropolis Museum, and it would be so nice to have them bathed in their wonderful Athenian light, looking at the Parthenon itself.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I leave the legal situation to Amal Clooney.
Speaker: But I do think that the Brits
Speaker: really saved those things.
Speaker: And I think that's no small thing.
Speaker: And I also think there's sort of the root of somehow of Western appreciation of Greek art.
Speaker: It's
Speaker: That's how it was known.
Speaker: That's kind of the first.
Speaker: There was Vinconon who had never been to Greece.
Speaker: And then there were these sculptures, beautiful sculptures, sort of suddenly accessible.
Speaker: Now, they're not beautifully displayed in the British Museum.
Speaker: They need a little facelift.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: Yeah, I noticed that despite the fact that it was the Ottomans who sold them, there's been no effort that I'm aware of by the Turks to try to buy them back from the Brits.
Speaker: I can just imagine the revolt that would spring up overnight in Greece.
Speaker: It would be kind of fun, right?
Speaker: Well, you know, a tribute to the fundamentally international character of these works of antique art.
Speaker: Lillian Barlet-Stoner, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker: This has been a lot of fun and a real pleasure.
Speaker: Thanks so much, Ben.
Speaker: Thanks for inviting me.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: When you walk into a Burlington, you're walking into amazing prices and great gifts.
Speaker: That's main character energy.
Speaker: Because at Burlington, the holiday savings aren't the only things turning heads.
Speaker: Discover quality finds and perfect presents for everyone on your list, even those who are hard to shop for.
Speaker: Toys and jewelry to new beauty brands and styles, these gifts go seamlessly from our stores to under your tree.
Speaker: Seriously, with these savings, why shop anywhere else?
