Their restoration has been embraced as a remarkable testament to the skill of art conservators who identified disparate, ancient pottery fragments and used them to recreate the treasures of antiquity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art rebuilt two classical Greek drinking cups from random shards that arrived at the Met in small batches from a variety of sources over a period of more than 15 years, beginning in 1978.
But the fragments from both cups, it turns out, had been gifted or sold to the museum by nearly an identical set of people — three of whom were later associated with the sale of looted antiquities.
Investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office seized one of the cups two years ago, asserted it had been looted, valued it at $1.2 million and returned it to Italy.
Now the Met has acknowledged that last year, without fanfare, it had returned the second cup, or kylix, agreeing that it too had been looted.
A spokeswoman for the Met, Ann Bailis, said the investigators had “provided the Met with new information that made it clear the work should be returned.”
Unlike the case with the first kylix, the Met said that, while it has transferred the title of the second one to Italy, officials there have agreed that the museum can keep the cup on display.
“This is a very positive example of a restitution leading to a loan agreement,” Ms. Bailis said.
Investigators and some experts say the cups also illustrate something far darker. They suggest that the frequent arrival of pottery shards that fit with others already at the museum was not a matter of startling serendipity. Rather, they say, it was part of a smuggling strategy by looters and dealers to avoid detection as governments cracked down on looting. Fragments became easier to sneak in than intact, illicit antiquities.
David Gill, an archaeologist and fellow with the Centre for Heritage at the University of Kent in England, has said the importation of looted antiquities became particularly difficult after 1970, when nations began ratifying a UNESCO treaty to stem the trade in illicit artifacts.
Though the treaty governed the conduct of nations, not institutions, museums began to adopt guidelines that aligned in spirit with its principles, agreeing, for example, to avoid antiquities lacking documented evidence that they had left countries of origin before 1970, or had been legally exported after 1970.
“They said, ‘We can’t handle this stuff,’” Gill said. “So there were new ways to bypass the system.”
Both of the cups are thought to have been created by two master artisans of ancient Greek Attic ceramics: Hieron, the potter, and Makron, the painter. Both cups are dated to around 490 BC.
The Greeks created cups like the kylix for use at symposiums, the sometimes bawdy drinking parties that featured music, poetry and debate. Attic pottery was coveted by the Etruscans, whose civilization dominated central Italy in the centuries before the rise of the Roman republic. Thousands of Greek artifacts, like the cups, became instruments of trade, and have been found in Etruscan tombs in Italy, many of which were targeted by looters.
Fragments for the kylix that was returned to Italy in 2022 arrived at the Met over a period of 16 years, either as gifts or purchased acquisitions, from four groups of sellers or donors: two Swiss dealers; a Los Angeles gallery part owned by the American dealer Robert Hecht; and a man who for decades served as the Met’s own chief curator of Greek and Roman antiquities, Dietrich von Bothmer.
The fragments used to recreate the second cup, which shows a scene of a victorious athlete being crowned by an older man in a gymnasium, were supplied to the museum by the same four sellers and donors. But the 44 fragments also included one sold to the museum by Hecht’s wife, Elizabeth.
Robert Hecht was a prominent antiquities expert who supplied artifacts to many museums and collectors. The authorities accused him several times of antiquities trafficking, but he was never convicted. Just a few years before his gallery sold fragments to the Met, Hecht had sold the museum an ancient Greek vase, a sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, for $1 million — a large price in 1972 — in an acquisition arranged by von Bothmer and the Met’s director at the time, Thomas Hoving.
Almost immediately, Italian investigators said the krater had been looted and publicly sought its return. But the Met resisted those entreaties for many years, until 2006, when it signed a broad agreement with Italy that transferred title to the krater and several other looted antiquities to Italy but allowed the krater and some other artifacts to remain at the museum on loan. (The Met finally returned the krater in 2008.)
Museum and Italian officials said the deal that allows the kylix to remain on display at the Met has been structured as an addendum to the 2006 agreement. The kylix is expected to be on loan for at least four years, though the loan could be extended. The Met said that the addendum also covered a group of small pieces of amber and vase fragments. Those were also repatriated to Italy along with the kylix in December.
The Carabinieri TPC, a branch of the Italian police that is responsible for combating art and antiquities crimes, said the kylix had been claimed “on the basis of evidence of its illicit provenance from Italy.”
“The Met recognized the archaeological find as belonging to the Italian State, displayed it with the inscription it belongs to us, and remains on loan,” Monica Satta, a Carabinieri official, said in an email.
Loan agreements have become a tool for museums looking to hold onto important items at a time when many countries are seeking the return of their cultural heritage. In 2022, the Met announced an arrangement to display one of the world’s most significant privately assembled collections of Cycladic antiquities. The works, put together by the businessman and philanthropist Leonard N. Stern, are to be displayed at the Met for at least 10 years, with an acknowledgment that they belong to Greece.
The latest repatriation followed the Met’s announcement last year of a major new research effort to investigate its holdings with the intention of returning items it determines to have problematic provenance histories.
In recent years, the museum has faced increasing scrutiny from law enforcement officials, academics and the news media over the degree to which its collection includes looted artifacts. As part of its expanded efforts, earlier this year it appointed a former Sotheby’s executive, Lucian Simmons, to a newly created position of head of provenance research.
In the case of the kylix, the Met said it had been approached by investigators from the district attorney’s office last year after an article in The New York Times noted the similarities between that cup and one the investigators had recently seized.
The district attorney’s office said in a statement that it was pleased that its efforts had led to an agreement with Italy.
“Our goal,” the statement said, “is to ensure that any antiquity that passes through New York illegally returns to the country that rightfully owns it.”
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