Cleveland Museum Of Art Will Return Tainted Antiquities To Italy

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                     Cleveland Museum of Art will return tainted antiquities to Italy Wednesday






by Steven Litt
/ Plain Dealer Architecture Critic
Tuesday April 21, 2009




Courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art

A red figure duck askos is one of the items that the Cleveland Museum of Art has agreed to return to Italy after officials proved that the objects had been illegally excavated or exported. The work, made around 350 B.C., probably came originally from Chiusi (ancient Clusium). It was acquired by the museum in 1975.



The Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday will hand over to Italian authorities 14 artworks allegedly tainted by illegal activity in Europe.

The transfer honors an historic agreement, reached last November, in which Italy said the objects had been looted, stolen or handled by traffickers before the museum innocently acquired them by gift or purchase between 1975 and 1996.

Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland museum, called the agreement with Italy "open and fair and equitable to all parties. I was pleased then, and still am, that we reached a conclusion that was just that."




David Andersen
/The Plain Dealer

Timothy Rub, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art


Neither Italy nor the museum seemed eager to draw attention to the transfer. It was unclear, for example, which Italian agency will shepherd the objects back to Italy.

The works being returned include 13 antiquities, mostly from south Italy, known to have been a hotbed of illegal excavation and smuggling.

The 14th work, a late Gothic processional cross stolen from a church in Trequanda, a village near Siena, is being returned as a gift from the museum to Italy, Italian authorities have said.

As part of the agreement, Italy has promised to loan 13 objects comparable in quality to the returned antiquities for renewable 25-year periods, and to cooperate on future special exhibitions.

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In addition, the museum agreed to form a joint scientific commission with Italian authorities to continue research on the large "Apollo Sauroktonos" acquired by the museum in 2004, plus a small bronze winged victory chariot ornament purchased in 1984.




The Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum ofArt and Italy have created a joint committee to examine the museum's "Victory with Cornucopia (Chariot Attachment)," purchased in 1984, plus a large bronze statue of Apollo Sauroktonos, or "Lizard Slayer," to determine whether the works were looted in violation of modern laws. "My focus going forward, and the principal point of contact with the Italian government, has been on what we intend to do in the future," Rub said.



Rub said the loaned objects from Italy would go on view in 2010, when the museum reopens the galleries devoted to ancient art in the museum's 1916 building as part of a $350 million expansion and renovation now under way.

Rub said that "things are going fine" on the loan requests. "We have some work to do in terms of finalizing requests to a number of museums with the blessing and concurrence of the [Italian] cultural ministry."

The restitution and the agreement on future cultural exchanges were the latest in a series of related accords between Italy and other American art museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Italian authorities used evidence collected in a police raid in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1995, which exposed a network of "tombaroli," or tomb robbers, who passed the works to middlemen who sold them to museums.

Among the most significant objects being returned to Italy from Cleveland is a fourth-century B.C. Apulian red-figured volute krater -- a large wine vessel -- by the Dorias painter, which stands roughly 4 feet high.

Other works include Etruscan silver bracelets; a Neolithic bronze warrior from Sardinia; an Attic rhyton, or drinking vessel, in the shape of a mule; and a large, Corinthian-column krater.

Rub said the condition of the objects was inspected both by Italian and museum officials Tuesday before they were crated and sealed for transfer today.

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Cleveland Museum of Art

A Campanian bird askos, a flat-bottomed vessel used for pouring liquids, will be returning to Italy from the Cleveland Museum of Art in exchange for the long term loan of a similar object. That's true for all 13 antiquities being restituted to Italy by the museum today. The work was donated to the museum in 1987 by Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman.









The museum turned down requests from The Plain Dealer to observe and photograph the packing of the artworks, in part out of concern for security and in part because museum views the transfer as less important than the agreement reached with Italy last fall.

"I look upon this as a kind of mechanical thing," Rub said. "The big news for me was the signing of the agreement."

Italian consulates Chicago and Detroit declined to comment, through the honorary vice consul for Italy in Cleveland, Serena Scaiola-Ziska. Maurizio Fiorilli, the Italian state attorney who negotiated the agreement, could not be reached at his office or via cell phone in Rome.

It isn't known what kind of reception Italy plans for the Cleveland objects. Italy has been blunt on occasion in the past about restituted objects.

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Associated Press
/Courtesy of the Italian Culture Ministry

An Apulian volute crater, dating back to the 4th Century B.C., is one of the 14 art works
to be returned to Italy by the Cleveland Museum of Art today.









Francesco Rutelli, Italy's former culture minister, spoke at a press conference before the 2007 opening of a show in Rome focusing on objects returned by American museums to Italy. He was quoted by The New York Times as saying the works had been excavated "from the bowels of the earth," "deprived of their identity" and "reduced to mere objects of beauty, without a soul."

Countries such as Italy and Greece have pursued the return of looted artworks forcefully in recent years. Rub said the lesson of the negotiations with Italy is that the museum will return objects to foreign countries only in the face of convincing evidence of wrongdoing.

"We have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the assets of the institution, of which the collection is most important," he said.