Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 06:17:34 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
http://www.edgarcayce.org/am/11,000b.c.yucata.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

"Ruins and the Rebirth of Art in Italy" - Spotlights Saved Art - UPDATE

Pages: [1] 2   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: "Ruins and the Rebirth of Art in Italy" - Spotlights Saved Art - UPDATE  (Read 440 times)
0 Members and 29 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: October 03, 2008, 09:49:14 am »

               




             








                                                    Colosseum spotlights saved art



                                         Exhibit shows how Italy learned to save its heritage






 (ANSA) -
Rome,
October 3 -

A new show at the Colosseum highlights Italy's strong tradition in preserving its art heritage.

The exhibition, entitled Ruins and Rebirth of Art In Italy, shows how efforts to foil tomb raiders stretch from the Renaissance to the present day, culminating in the formation of Italy's world-famous art cops, a Carabinieri unit which has worked in Iraq and other countries targeted by traffickers.

Some 60 works from Italy and abroad, most dating back to classical times, are arranged on the second tier of the Colosseum.

All these works were originally saved from raiders and traders by art protection movements and laws.

Among them are a 100BC Roman statue called The Haranguer or Orator from Florence's Archeological Museum; the famous Birth of Bacchus from Budapest; the Gustiniani Hestia statue of an austere noblewoman from Rome's Torlonia collection; and the 'Dea Roma' (Rome Goddess) from Ostia.

Other significant works are the 'Marciante' Artemis, recovered in 2001 after a five-year fight against traffickers who commissioned no fewer than five copies in a bid to sidetrack art cops; an Apollo found at the villa of famous Ancient Roman jurist Domitius Ulpianus at Santa Marinella near Rome; and a statue of the tragic Greek mythological mother Niobe from an ancient Roman villa, reunited for the first time with its head, recently identified in Poland.

The first section of the show, At the Origins Of Protection, shows how Italy gradually developed a sense of the importance of keeping its heritage intact, from the Renaissance onwards.

It highlights that the famous Doric friezes called 'metope' on an ancient Greek temple at Selinunte, Sicily, were saved from the British Museum's attentions by a law passed in pre-unification Italy.

The second section of the exhibition, The Unification and National Education, moves to the late 19th-century drive by the Italian state to buy up archaeological dig sites and recently discovered artefacts, as well as taking museums out of private hands. One of the examples is how the Italian government purchased a famed collection of statues of philosophers which had stood since the 17th century in the gardens of the Boncompagni Ludovisi palace - today home to the American embassy.

The show's third section, 20th Century Progress, highlights how Italy started promulgating art conservation and anti-trafficking laws, the most important coming in 1909, which established the principle that antiquities were primarily state property.

As well as the Hestia, this section spotlights a stunning statue of the Greek goddess of wisdom and war Athena, found near Rome and on show for the first time after a long restoration. The symbol of the show, a terracotta statue of an ancient Mother Goddess dug up in the dead of night at an Abruzzo dig in 2003 to foil hovering thieves, is also part of this section.

The fourth section, entitled Fascist Propaganda and the War, exhibits a range of classical works used by the Fascist regime for propaganda purposes, including a bust of Apollo which Mussolini bought for a visit by Hitler.

The fifth section, The Evolution of Heritage Principles, chronicles the postwar years, showing how war-damaged works were repaired and Italy's devotion to its art came to the fore in the efforts to save Florence from the ravages of a huge flood in 1966 and in later post-earthquake work at Assisi and other sites.

The final section, Counter-Trend, Heritage Protection Today, shows how Italy has upped its efforts to nab tomb raider and traffickers and forged accords for the return of priceless antiquities, most notably from a range of US museums.

''The exhibition shows how Italy gradually learned to save and reclaim its heritage,'' said one of the organisers, Etruscology professor Adriano La Regina, Rome's former Archaeology Superintendent. The show's organisers have been keen to stress how these unprecedented returns, the subject of a recent hit show, have been possible by agreements which raise collaboration with foreign institutes and envisage loans of equivalent value. The show, which runs until February 15, 2009, marks the 100th anniversary of the landmark law on the protection of Italy's huge trove of antiquities - the largest of any country.

The 1909 law is still enshrined in the National Heritage Code and its principles were included in Italy's 1948 constitution.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2008, 03:26:21 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2008, 12:40:52 pm »



               

                "Ruins and the Rebirth of Art in Italy,"

a show that opened in early October at the Colosseum in Rome, features ancient works of Italian art.

The bust of Augustus from Prima Porta purchased on the antiquarian market in 1938.

Photo:
Giuseppe Schiavinotto/
Italian Culture Ministry



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/10/07/arts/08heritageslide_index.html
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 12:57:49 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #2 on: October 08, 2008, 12:49:10 pm »




               

                Italian Culture Ministry

                An Etruscan statue in

                “Ruins and the Rebirth of Art in Italy.”










                                              Italy Defends Treasures (and Laws) With a Show




             

 
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: October 7, 2008

ROME — An exhibition celebrating a century-old piece of legislation may not seem an obvious crowd pleaser. But for the curators, it’s a way of arguing that Italy’s art treasures would be vastly diminished were it not for its strict — some assert, draconian — cultural-heritage laws.


A Century of Italian Art That’s why every statue, vase and archaeological shard on display in “Ruins
and the Rebirth of Art in Italy,” a show that opened last week at the Colosseum in Rome, has a story
to tell.

Artworks can be plundered by tomb robbers or invading armies, or demolished as cities expand. Natural catastrophes like a volcanic eruption can wipe out entire cities, as Mount Vesuvius’s did to Pompeii in A.D. 79.

Italy’s response has been a series of laws first codified in 1909 in a statute declaring that “all manner of things movable or immovable” that are at least 50 years old and “of historical, archaeological, paleo-anthropological interest” fall under the government’s protection.

The fruits of that statute are evident in displays like a first-century statue, the so-called Marching Artemis, which was dug up illegally around 1994 and then sold to Swiss art traffickers. The traffickers tried in turn to sell it to Japanese and American collectors when the looted pieces were identified by Italy’s elite art-theft squad.

To throw the police off their scent, the traffickers had tried to market an almost perfect mirror image they had commissioned from a funerary-monument maker in Rome. The police did not fall for the ruse, and that copy is also on view.
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 01:16:25 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #3 on: October 08, 2008, 12:52:45 pm »









There are earthquake-shattered pieces of Renaissance Virgins and a blocklike marble head from the seventh or eighth century B.C., one of 5,172 fragments of stone body parts unearthed in Sardinia in 1974. Experts believe the older figures, reconstructed, could be six or seven feet high.

“Where do we put them, in which museum?” asked Elena Cagiano, an archaeologist who is one of the show’s curators. “That’s the sort of debate that these patrimony laws inspire.”

Also on view is a gigantic second-century marble statue of Dionysus that was once in the National Roman Museum in Rome, and that was given to Hitler by Mussolini in January 1944. It came back to Italy in 1991 after German scholars lobbied for its return. (Italy is still hoping to retrieve the head of the statue, which is thought to have been illegally excavated in 1928 along the Appian Way near Castel Gandolfo, transported to England and donated in 1966 to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.)

The exhibition is part of a broader scholarly program to study and celebrate the 1909 cultural-heritage legislation, which laid the groundwork for protective laws adopted in subsequent decades. “That early law consolidated principles that are still active today,” said Adriano La Regina, one of Rome’s leading archaeologists and the chief curator of the exhibition.

In addition to its right to regulate the sale, export or restoration of any property that is more than 50 years old and has artistic value, the state has the authority to acquire any such object that is being privately sold, as long as it pays an equal price. Successive laws have also enshrined the notion that any artifact dug out of the ground belongs to the state and not the owner of the land (although the landowner and the finder are usually entitled to rewards).

Mr. La Regina likes to point out that when it comes to restitution, Italy abides by its own rules.

Last August the Italian government returned a headless and armless statue, the so-called Venus of Cyrene, to Libya as part of a $5 billion compensation accord for damage inflicted by Italy during its colonial period there. (Italy invaded Libya in 1911 and retained power there until its troops were driven out by Allied forces during World War II.)

The statue was unearthed by Italian archaeologists in 1913 at the ancient city of Cyrene and transferred to Rome.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #4 on: October 08, 2008, 12:54:53 pm »








“Thank goodness we have these laws,” said Mr. La Regina, who like many Italian cultural officials frets that more recent cultural-heritage laws may dilute the original law’s tenets.

Critics say that a 2004 law has made it harder to argue for the artistic and historical interest of monuments and has diminished the role played by the Culture Ministry’s expert officials, known as superintendents.

Yet many art and antiques dealers counter that Italy’s cultural protectionism goes too far.

Domenico Piva, president of the Italian federation of art dealers, said it was “preposterous” that a release form must be obtained from the Culture Ministry each time a 50-year-old art object is exported, “even if it’s an industrial object by an architect.”

He said the laws had “led to the creation of an entirely internal and provincial art market” and restricted the profile of modern Italian artists abroad. “We complain that the Impressionists have a great international market, and our own artists are ignored, but it’s because our artists only circulate in Italy,” he said.

But Cosimo Ceccuti, the president of a national committee for the celebration of the conservation laws, said that such arguments miss the point.

“The first thing to bear in mind is that art is the patrimony of humanity,” he said. The Italian government’s first priority, he added, is to ensure that it continues to exist.

"We must make sure that this patrimony will pass down to future generations," Mr. Ceccuti said.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/arts/design/08heri.html
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 12:56:25 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #5 on: October 08, 2008, 12:59:25 pm »




             





The Exhibition is part of a broader scholarly program to study and celebrate the 1909 cultural-heritage legislation, which laid the ground work for protective laws.

A fragment of a Meotope with a Bearded head.

Photo:
Italian Culture Ministry
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 01:01:31 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #6 on: October 08, 2008, 01:02:52 pm »




                 





Artworks were often plundered by tomb robbers or invading armies or demolished as cities expand.

A statue of Apollo with a quiver from Ulpian's Villa at Santa Marinella, near Rome.


Photo:
Italian Culture Ministry
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 01:04:03 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #7 on: October 08, 2008, 01:05:20 pm »




               






A sculpture of a Menad with fawn, from the Veneziani collection.

The head is ancient, the wreath and the base are neoclassical.


Photo:
Italian Culture Ministry
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 01:06:53 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #8 on: October 08, 2008, 01:08:22 pm »



               



A statue of a philosopher seated on a throne of the Epicurus type.


Photo:
Italian Culture Ministry




http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/10/07/arts/08heritageslide_2.html
« Last Edit: October 08, 2008, 01:11:37 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #9 on: October 10, 2008, 03:27:44 pm »










Ingrid D. Rowland
TheAustralianOnLine
October 04, 2008








                                            B A C K   T O   T H E   S O U R C E






Who Owns Antiquity?

Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage

By James Cuno
Princeton University Press,
228pp, $US24.95


The encyclopedic museums' argument against repatriation of classical artefacts is self-servingly flawed, writes Ingrid D. Rowland



EARLY this year, the state apartments of the Palazzo del Quirinale hosted a remarkable exhibition of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan artefacts, all found on Italian soil but held until recently in museums and private collections in the US, notably the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibition was a diplomatic coup for Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome, who until April was minister of culture for two years in the left-wing government of Romano Prodi.

Through long-term loans and the deft application of diplomatic pressure, Rutelli had convinced museum directors that returning these artefacts, all acquired from dealers whose methods were not entirely scrupulous, would help discourage the illegal looting of archeological sites in Italy.

The exhibition was also a triumph of Italian taste. The 17th and 19th-century frescoes in the vast halls of the presidential palace echoed the classical grace and mythological themes of the ancient objects; the palazzo’s Ming vases provided a cross-cultural comparison, and the crowds who gathered to see the show, mostly Italian, were impeccably coiffed and dressed. To judge from their conversations, most were also impeccably knowledgeable.

The occasion provided an evocative portrait of contemporary Italy, a country with cultural traditions that reach back millennia, but also one that has transformed itself since World War II from a recipient of UNICEF funds into one of the eight most formidable economic powers on the planet, not least because of that Italian reputation for style.

The exhibition took place in buildings saturated with history and symbolism, and stands as a challenge to the picture of museums, nations, and archeological material that James Cuno presents in his new book. 
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #10 on: October 10, 2008, 03:29:58 pm »










Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, faces directly the complex problems posed by the immense global market in antiquities. His position raises the expectation that his analysis of this tangled issue would be reasoned, thoughtful and historically as well as politically informed.

But his book begins with a series of scenarios more fit for a polemicist’s pamphlet.

‘‘The emotional ‘national cultural identity’ card played by some proponents of nationalist retentionist cultural property laws is really a strategic, political card,’’ Cuno writes.

‘‘National museums are important instruments in the formation of nationalist narratives; they are used to tell the story of a nation’s past and confirm its present importance. That may be true of national museums, but it is not true of encyclopedic museums, those whose collections comprise representative examples of the world’s artistic legacy.’’ In other words, attempts by nations such as Egypt, Italy, Greece, Mexico and Cambodia to hold on to their archeological legacy prevent the acquisition of artefacts by ‘‘great encyclopedic museums’’. This is bad because looting will continue anyway, and the museum-going public will be denied the sight of inspirational works of art. Retentionist nationalism is the dragon that Cuno would slay in this book, rather than the greedy trade that has inspired such retentionist legislation in the first place.

Cuno’s prime example of an encyclopedic museum is an institution whose name, the British Museum, suggests no small connection with the idea of nationhood.

It was undoubtedly a product of Enlightenment idealism, as Cuno notes repeatedly, but that idealism more than coincidentally assumed that being British was the best of all possible human conditions, just as Napoleon Bonaparte, across the Channel, assumed that true Enlightenment could speak only French and was willing to pillage the Vatican museums to prove his point.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #11 on: October 10, 2008, 03:31:19 pm »










The great encyclopedic museums were predicated on the idea that their local public constituted the world’s best people and hence the most deserving to stand in the presence of high culture. It is either naive or tendentious to argue that they were founded instead to serve some great multicultural vision of human fraternity.

Indeed, a certain basic confusion of arguments nags Cuno’s book from beginning to end.

However earnest its purpose, Who Owns Antiquity? plays so fast and loose with history and logic in its opening chapters that it cannot possibly gather together its dissipated forces to deliver the intended final punch, which is a plea for those great encyclopedic museums to act as peacemakers in today’s fragmented, polarised, conflict-ridden world. Peacemaking is a novel role for institutions that were founded to serve as the monumental trophy cases of great powers.

Cuno takes special pains to disparage the very country that should be one of his most promising allies in his new humanitarian mission for large museums: Italy. His opening chapters aim a few choice blows at Italian antiquities laws for their ‘‘nationalist retentionist’’ folly, and a long footnote blasts Rutelli for ‘‘political antics’’.

Yet when the book moves on to specific examples of nationalism and its perils, it concentrates on the history of Ottoman and then modern Turkey, 20th and 21st-century Iraq, and the People’s Republic of China, nearly bypassing Italy altogether. Each of the countries that Cuno considers at length has certainly posed dangers for its archeological record in our time, but for drastically different reasons, and they are all still struggling out of the Third World into the First.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #12 on: October 10, 2008, 03:32:43 pm »










But not so Italy. It is both a source country, a producer of antiquities, and, owing to its wealth and millennial culture, a prime consumer. In many respects, Italy is where China, Turkey and Egypt would like to be.

Nor will it do to hit at Italian laws and then dodge a forthright look at Italy’s relationship not only with antiquity, but indeed with the discipline of archeology. Italy, after all, is rare among nations because it is both a prime producer and a prime consumer of archeological artefacts.

Because of this, it poses the most specific and sophisticated challenge to the directors of museums now facing the consequences of rapacious acquisition policies.

Italy has a long acquaintance with traffic in antiquities. The Roman siege of Corinth by Lucius Mummius in 146 BC ended in widespread looting, including of ancient Corinthian graves for their jewellery and ceremonial vessels. A radically different idea of cultural property dominates a legal case that was argued in Rome, Rutelli’s native city, in 70 BC by a rising young lawyer named Marcus Tullius Cicero. Early in his career, Cicero made the risky choice to prosecute the corrupt and greedy Gaius Verres for misconduct as governor of Sicily. Despite Verres’s powerful social connections and bullying ways Cicero won, because he prosecuted his case with hardheaded clarity. Imperial power and imperial amounts of money, he would claim convincingly, do not justify disrupting the integrity of a culture.

‘‘You will say, ‘I bought it’,’’ he scoffed to Verres.

‘‘So what? It is simply arrogant to say ‘Sell me those vases’ — that is to say, ‘You’re not worthy to have something so well made. Those fit better with my own rank.’ ’’ Italy poses other problems for Cuno’s line of argument. He insists there is no connection between the present populations of Turkey and China and the creators of those territories’ archeological remains: a Turk is not a Hittite, any more than Han Chinese are responsible for the marvels found along the Central Asian stretches of the Silk Road. Consequently, he argues, there is no reason that the archeological heritage should be of national rather than general human interest. By extension, ancient objects that these territories contain may as well be at Harvard or Berlin rather than Dunhuang and Turpan. 
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #13 on: October 10, 2008, 03:34:02 pm »









Yet it is impossible to insist on a gap between the archeological and biological heritage of the Italian peninsula’s present-day inhabitants. DNA tests have shown that modern Tuscans are indeed related to the Etruscans found in local tombs: one family in Volterra, the Cecina, boasts both a close friend of Cicero and an 18th-century antiquarian.

The cultural connections are unbroken. By the 15th century the artists, writers, statesmen and natural philosophers of the Italian Renaissance had developed an acute awareness of their Etruscan and Roman pasts, and expressed it in such a way that their legacy still stands as a basic component of modern Italian — and Western — culture. Italy is also the place where, in the 15th century, archeology was invented, along with the first public art museum, which was opened on Rome’s Capitoline Hill in 1471 by pope Sixtus IV.

Cuno’s desire to make an enlightened argument invites an Enlightenment response: it is a different thing to see the ancient statue called the Spinario right there in Rome where Sixtus put it in 1471, where many of the great artists of the Renaissance drew it, where J. J. Winckelmann and Goethe saw it, than it is to see an ancient bronze in the Met in New York.

It is one thing to stand in the theatre of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey, right there where the riot broke out among the silversmiths who made votive trinkets for the Temple of Artemis and feared the influence a wandering preacher named Paul of Tarsus might have on their business, and quite another matter to see a column from that temple in the British Museum.

The Elgin Marbles have been spared the foul air of modern Athens, but they were not spared a good British scrub-down with soap and water when they arrived in the early 19th century. 
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #14 on: October 10, 2008, 03:35:41 pm »









Cuno’s earnest plea for great encyclopedic museums reveals certain mundane set of interests.

As Cicero said, ‘‘Cui bono? ’’ For whose benefit? Who is this book’s real audience? It can be no coincidence that several words fundamental to a proper understanding of the present-day antiquities market never appear in Cuno’s book: words such as greed, hubris and organised crime.

For that matter, the word money barely appears, despite the mountains of lucre the great encyclopedic museums require and dispense.

Italy and its cultural property laws illustrate with precision that nationalism is not a simple phenomenon. Through the ages, nationalism has been one of the mechanisms by which an agrarian society transforms itself into an urban society with a healthier, wealthier and more literate population. Italians once served foreign archeologists as workmen, cooks, maids and washerwomen because they lacked education.

Now Italian scholars, including archeologists, are as erudite as any, and it is the foreigners who have the disadvantage. The reasons are political, to be sure, but more emphatically they are practical: how can an American professor who comes to Italy only in summer claim superior knowledge to someone who lives and studies there? The idea of Italy as a latecomer among nations, because it unified in 1870, is a bit of a canard. Here are two anecdotal refutations. A manuscript from 1493 in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich contains a series of scurrilous Latin poems aimed at ‘‘Itali’’ who have accused these German writers — whom the Itali called barbarians — of drunkenness; the Germans retaliate by accusing the Italians of pederasty.

Thirty years later, the Adages of Erasmus of Rotterdam proclaimed that a bald man from Mykonos was as hard to find as a brave Italian: an italus bellicosus .

As Italy went after World War II, so the rest of the world hopes to go. A growing number of modern Egyptians are no longer illiterate fellahin.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Pages: [1] 2   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy