The History Blog

Then wake up at the crack of dawn and head to the Palazzo Vecchio, where 50 people will be allowed to view the archaeological dig in progress underneath the storied building. It’s like a club sandwich of Florentine history on display for you and 98 other eyes.

Visitors enter through a side door of the Palazzo, where a copy of the statue of David sits in front. They enter a cavernous room, where there’s a series of trenches, metres deep, and criss-crossed by wooden planks.

Archaeologists have spent the past few years unearthing the remains of an ancient Roman theatre — known as the Commune — discovering how the city evolved over 2,000 years.

“The Palazzo Vecchio has preserved all of the structures, whether Roman, medieval and even up to the renaissance, in its foundations,” says archeologist Lorenzo Spezzi, who has been working at the site since 2004.

“Here you see all of the ages of the city, from its establishment to the renaissance. That’s the wonderful thing about this area. You see, even from one room, the evolution of the city of Florence.”

The Commune was one of the first structures built after the Romans settled the town and was in continuous use for the 500-600 years. Then there’s a medieval street, complete with cesspit and all the facades of the buildings lining it still intact.

The dig is scheduled to be finished in a few months. After that, the city is planning to make available a permanent guided tour of the site.

As conditions in Iraq improve, more and more historical attractions are opening back up. Not the main one, though. The National Museum in Baghdad, so brutally looted 5 1/2 years ago, is still a wreck.

The US government is stepping up the plate and donating $13 million to restore the museum and support other archaeological endeavors.

U.S. forces came under widespread criticism in the immediate aftermath of the invasion for failing to prevent the looting of priceless relics from the museum, even while troops were dispatched to secure other sites such as the Oil Ministry.

“This is an investment not only in Iraq’s heritage but in the world’s heritage,” the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said. The money will be used for archaeology and museum training projects as well as the restoration of the museum.

Seems only fair. I wouldn’t mind if the number on the check were larger, but at least this nest egg should be enough to get the museum back on its feet.

The Brooks Brothers (!) coat Abraham Lincoln was wearing the night of his assassination is part of Ford’s Theater permanent collection.

Until last year when Ford’s closed for renovations, the coat had been on exhibit since the museum acquired it in 1968, but now that reopening approaches, some conservators are concerned that the coat can’t take being on public display much longer.

Light and gravity can doom historic clothing, they say. And the Brooks Brothers coat, like other Lincoln garments, had been on almost continuous display from the time they were acquired in 1968 until Ford’s was closed for renovation last year, officials said.

“It might be that it’s time to put these things away and not to exhibit them to the public if there’s any hope of saving them for future generations,” said Cathy Heffner, president of Textile Preservation Associates, who said she examined the clothes for the National Park Service last month.

The concern illustrates an ongoing debate over the display of national treasures: the desire to preserve items for posterity vs. the right of citizens to experience them.

It’s a tough question. Light damages textiles irreparably. There is no way to restore them once the UV rays have done their thing. UV blocking technology can help delay the inevitable, but it’s not a long-term solution.

Meanwhile, people want to see these kinds of deeply personal artifacts of iconic figures. How much closer can you get to the great man himself than to see his blood on his coat?

A new exhibit of antiquities on display in the Colosseum is showcasing the long history of Italian efforts to fight tomb raiders from the Renaissance to the present.

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.

That’s just the beginning. The exhibit lays out the history of the rise of a sense of Italian cultural patrimony, a feeling which grew from the Renaissance and long pre-dated political unification.

For example, the British Museum, not satisfied with the fruits of Elgin’s rape of the Acropolis, had its leer fixed on the Doric friezes of the Greek temple complex in Selinunte, Sicily. These friezes are in a unique style and widely considered to be the oldest extant examples of Greek sculpture.

They were saved from a fate worst than death by a law passed in pre-unification Italy. The BM had to be content with plaster casts.

Cool, right? I had no idea.

I love the scope of this exhibit. You can’t beat the location, and it’s such great publicity for the Carabinieri art squad, who have done an amazing job addressing the problem of systemic looting of heritage sites not just in Italy itself, but also when they were deployed in Iraq after the invasion.

For more detail on the exhibit, see this New York Times story.

Inspired by the rise of Holocaust deniers in the later 70’s, stamp collector, civil rights activist and writer Ken Lawrence began a unique collection: postal memorabilia of the Holocaust.

Over the next 30 years, Lawrence amassed 250 pieces of mail which provide a remarkable, chillingly mundane glimpse into the workaday world of the Holocaust.

His collection includes rarities like an envelope from a letter sent from Dachau in 1933, shortly after the concentration camp opened; a certified-mail receipt for a prayer book sent to a Jew in a French camp; a postal checking account receipt with a crude anti-Semitic cartoon indicating payment for a Nazi propaganda newspaper; the only known letter from Rabbi Leo Baeck, leader of German Jewry, when he was held in the Theresienstadt ghetto; cards from two previously unlisted camps in Romania; and mail sent to a Nazi doctor on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1945.

Mr. Lawrence described the biblical scroll used as a parcel wrapper, which recounts part of the tale of David and Goliath, as “the most viscerally disturbing item” in the collection. “Some scholars have told me it is among the most important surviving evidence of Nazi desecration,” he said.

He’s now sold the collection to the Spungen Family Foundation in Illinois, who will continue to add to the collection while putting it on public display in the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

If you can’t get to Illinois anytime soon, don’t fret. The Spungen Foundation has put the entire collection online. They’re not just thumbnails, either. Every wrenching postcard and notice of arrest is viewable full-size in pdf format.

It’s not any of the major pieces of the Parthenon frieze controversially housed in the British Museum. Lord Elgin gave this fragment to the British consul-general of Sicily when he was passing through with his ill-gotten gain in 1816.

It’s been in Sicily ever since, and now it’s finally home, personally transported to Athens by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

The sculpted fragment of the ancient Greek hunt goddess Artemis, part of the eastern Parthenon frieze depicting the twelve gods of Olympus, had been in the collection of the Antonio Salinas Archaeological Museum of Palermo.

Greece had sought to secure its return for 13 years, the Greek culture minister said.

The fragment depicts the goddess’ right foot and part of her long robe.

“For the first time in nearly two centuries, a valuable fragment of the Parthenon’s sculpted decoration returns to be embodied where it belongs,” Culture Minister Michalis Liapis told reporters.

Hint, hint. Ever since the New Acropolis Museum opened, Greece has been putting serious pressure on the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles.

The BM hasn’t been receptive to Greek entreaties, needless to say. Collecting fragments of the frieze scattered about is a great way to keep the situation in the papers and to make the British Museum look like a dick for not being willing to even consider what other countries are doing.

Edit for clarification: The piece is on loan to Greece. It will return to the Palermo museum at the end of the year.

commenter Mark Watson

Earlier this year, I posted repeatedly about the federal raids on looted and overvalued-for-tax-fraud Asian antiquities in prominent California museums.

One of the sad results of this investigation was the arrest and death in custody of Asian antiquities specialist Roxanna Brown. She was known as a vocal opponent of the trade in looted artifacts, so it was shocking that she would be involved in this ugliness in the first place. Her sudden death was even more so.

Now the LA Times has a 3-part story on the life and death of Roxanna Brown, her fascinating history ranging from being a freelance reporter in Vietnam during the war, to her opium addiction, to her marriage to a Buddhist monk, to the brutal car accident resulting in the loss of her leg, to becoming the preeminent expert on Asian ceramics, to actually helping the feds in the early stages of the investigation, to her devastating final descent into tax fraud and antiquities smuggling, and horrible, awful death.

Here’s a bit about how the collectors, the Markells, used Roxanna Brown’s reputation to submit phony appraisals for donated antiquities so they could write greater sums off on their taxes.

In another e-mail exchange from March 2007, Markell asked Brown to sign six to eight blank appraisal forms for future donations and offered the scholar $300 “for using you, as it were, as the appraiser. . . .”

“If you are nervous about doing this, please realize that the Republicans are still in office, the IRS does not have enough personnel to review small-time appraisals and the appraisals are very well written and will never be challenged,” Markell wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail filed with the affidavit.

The documents indicate that Brown responded via e-mail the same day: “No problem! I am delighted to be your partner in this.”

That’s not all she did. Smuggler Robert Olson, the key fence of stolen goods in the museum investigation, had a whole file named “Roxanna” and this is the kind of stuff the feds found in it.

In one undated document, Brown offered to sell Olson ancient bronze bracelets, Neolithic stone tools and Thai ceramics from “burial sites on the Burmese border,” according to copies of the correspondence attached to the July affidavit.

In an e-mail dated April 2002 that bears her name, she confirmed that she had received $14,000 in cash from Olson for a prehistoric bronze. Two months later, another e-mail from Brown advised Olson’s grandson of a Thai bank account to which additional money could be sent.

So she was smuggling looted antiquities herself. It’s hard to wrap my mind around this.

When I first posted about her death, the articles suggested “an apparent heart attack.” The truth is Roxanna Brown died of a perforated ulcer, vomiting her own excrement in a jail cell.

Read the whole story here:

This article adds some juice to the dry announcement of the eye’s return.

Zawi Hawass himself apparently saw it while he was in town for the Tut exhibit, recognized it right away and negotiated directly with the collector to get it back.

Notice the use of the standard “in good faith” clause. Whenever you see that in conjunction with a returned antiquities, what that actually means is that the originating country won’t prosecute the collector for buying stolen goods.

It’s not a genuine assessment of the collector’s approach to purchasing antiquities, which more often that not is better described as “avoiding the dirty reality because they like old stuff.”

It was stolen from the temple in Luxor during a fire in 1972. The looters found the usual willing buyer: a greedy antiquities dealer willing to purchase to loot no questions asked.

The greedy antiquities dealer found the usual willing fence in Sotheby’s, where a German dealer bought it at auction.

From there, the eye traveled to a museum in Basel, Switzerland, and now that Switzerland has signed a memo of understanding with Egypt to return illegally exported antiquities, it’s finally going back home, only 35 years after it was stolen.

There are going to be lots more stories like these as Switzerland confronts its long history of warehousing looted goods.

This time it’s not just pending litigation, but rather a major, major score of almost 3,898 Inca and pre-Inca artifacts returned from the National Institute of Latin American Anthropology and Thinking in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

According to the Peruvian embassy in Buenos Aires, these pieces include valuable ceramics, textiles, metal objects from different pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as a colonial picture, all of which were taken out of the country illegally.

These artifacts are part of an 18,000-piece collection of Peruvian cultural heritage that was illegally taken to Argentina, affirmed the Peruvian embassy.

I can’t find any other information about this collection, the circumstances of its removal from Peru or the legal reasoning behind the return of a fraction of it. I’ll keep digging.