The History Blog

The Onassis Cultural Center will be hosting an exhibit of ancient Minoan artifacts starting March 13.

The exhibition brings to light aspects of Minoan daily life during the second and third millennia B.C., including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion, and technology.

In eleven thematic sections, the exhibition maps chronologically the establishment and great achievements of Minoan culture. Here the viewer can explore the historical and cultural context of this celebrated society and gain insight into its mysteries, such as the legends surrounding the reign of King Minos of Knossos, who commissioned the fabled Labyrinth of Greek mythology.

Most of these pieces have never been seen outside of Crete, so if you’re planning on being in the Northeast US between March 13 and September 13, you might want to make a point of visiting.

Remember: Minoans are reknown not just for the legendary labyrinth designed by Daedalus, the bull dancers, queen Pasiphae having sex with a bull and giving birth to the Minotaur, but also for topless babes. That place was lousy with breastseses.

Just sayin’, in case it sweetens the deal for anyone.

Today is a bad day for art thieves and looters. The Swiss police have found 2 of the 4 paintings stolen from a Zurich museum earlier this month, and the Italian police have recovered more than 400 looted artifacts including a Pompeiian fresco, Etruscan goblets and Greek vases.

From Swiss, Italian Police Recover Stolen Art, Artifacts:

The two paintings, by van Gogh and Monet, were found on Monday in a car parked outside a Zurich psychiatric hospital, police said and have an estimated value of 70 million Swiss francs ($64 million).

Police were notified about the paintings by an employee of the hospital on Monday afternoon who told them there was a suspicious white vehicle in the car park in front of the clinic and there were two pictures sitting on the back seat, the police said in a statement.

That’s right. They left the $64 million dollar paintings in the car. That gets the WTF prize of the year. Here’s hoping the thieves do something equally stupid with the remaining two paintings, Cezanne’s “The Boy in the Red Vest” and Degas’ “Viscount Lepic and His Daughters“.

The Italian artifacts were at least squirreled away in an anonymous Frenchman’s villa.

Investigators identified the colourful Pompeiian fresco as perhaps the most prized object. Probably a 1st century A.D. work, the fragments show gardens, fountains and parts of a villa that was once home to Poppea Sabina, the wife of Emperor Nero.

Other significant finds included a virtually intact mosaic showing a young boy with cropped black hair and large black eyes, and a rare Kalpis—a Greek vase used for holding oil or water—featuring delicate figures.

An assortment of jugs, saucers, chalices and vases bearing figures in red, beige and black completed the rich collection.

They have some rare wonders on exhibit right now. Three panels from Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise”, the astonishingly gorgeous gilded cast bronze doors of the Florence baptistery, are on display until April.

These panels do not travel, folks, so this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see them restored and up close. After the tour ends, they are going home to be kept in an oxygen-free space and will never leave the city again.

Opening Thursday, February 21, an extensive exhibition of Roman Art from the Louvre is a must-see. Not only are the individual pieces exquisite (of course), but it looks like the Seattle Art Museum has really gone all out to create a unique and illuminating design to showcase these wonders.

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer :

The objects in the Roman collection rarely move. Only 200 or so are on exhibit at any one time. Most remain in storage. With the American tour, the Louvre wants to conceive new installations beyond the usual classifications of materials (bronzes, marbles and glass, for instance) and chronology to those that reveal different aspects of Roman life, its private and public domains. It is a world known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar. All of it bears exploration and examination.

“We want to reimagine the collection,” Roger said. “We want to mix everything up to see what happens when, for example, a huge marble statue sits next to a small bronze, to see what kind of space is needed.” [...]

The Louvre cannot paint its walls to accommodate different exhibits because it is a historic building, but the Seattle Art Museum can. So the exhibit of nearly 200 objects that takes up the entire fourth floor of the south wing is seen in rooms painted in dramatic colors — antique yellow, somber burgundy, serene gray-green, almost pumpkin. It’s a palette adapted from a typical Roman house, suggested by Giroire and Roger. The effect of the different colors and pinpoint lighting, said Roger, is startling. Everything, particularly the marble, pops almost theatrically.

This is the only place on the west coast you can see the exhibit. I think it’s worth a special trip if you’re anywhere remotely nearby, especially since you can enter the Gates of Paradise at the same time.

On the question of museums’ complicity in the looting of antiquities, here’s a brief but punchy op-ed by Robert Bagley, a Princeton University specialist in Asian archaeology, and Patty Gerstenblith, director of DePaul University’s program in art and cultural heritage law.

In an ever-smaller world, and an increasingly multicultural society, our museums have an educational mission whose importance would be hard to overstate. For many people the art museum is the most immediate, effective and appealing way to encounter the past and to engage with other cultures. But amassing collections of looted antiquities is not the way for our museums to fulfill their mission, though many museum directors would have us believe otherwise. With the money required to buy one major object that will be seen by a trickle of visitors over the years, a museum could organize a loan exhibition that would bring it a hundred major objects and that would be seen by thousands or tens of thousands of visitors in a matter of months. Which way of spending the money does more for education? When some museum directors choose to purchase one object rather than borrow a hundred, they claim to be acting in the interests of their visitors, but surely they are deceived as to their own motives. They are motivated by a curatorial culture that puts acquisition above all else–acquisition before education, before knowledge, before the public interest. It is through intercultural exchanges, not through trafficking in illicit antiquities, that American museums should fulfill their educational mission and discharge their responsibility to the American public.

That’s an excellent point I hadn’t thought of. The Met broke the million dollar barrier when it bought the Euphronious krater in 1972. An anonymous collector bought the 3 inch high Guennol Lioness in November of last year for $57 million, setting a whole other stratospheric record.

This is the kind of money museums have to spend to wallow in the filth of plundered history. For the price of a single statue the size of a kid’s hand, museums could fund huge exhibitions of loaned wonders.

They wouldn’t even have to fund the entire thing. Most loaned exhibits have corporate sponsors footing a hefty portion of the bill. The First Emperor exhibit at the British Museum, for instance, is sponsored by Morgan Stanley. That support will be bolstered by Delta and UPS when it moves to the High Museum in Atlanta.

You can’t even buy an advance ticket for that exhibition, btw. They’ve sold out completely through the end of the run. The only way to get tickets now is to stand in line with literally a thousand other people before the museum opens for a shot at one of 500 tickets available for that day’s show.

So, for a fraction of the cost of a single statuette, the British Museum gets hundreds of thousands of paying visitors at 24 bucks a pop, huge publicity, a chance to educate a voracious public with a high quality, detailed curatorial framework plus all kinds of ancillary lectures, debates, workshops, etc.

It’s not even a contest, frankly. By any possible standard — financial, educational, ethical, legal, PR — the loan system completely blows the antiquities trade out of the water.

On a hilltop outside of Washington D.C., stands a gothic revival “cottage” (34 rooms is a bit more than a cottage, but that’s what they called it at the time) in which Abraham and Mrs. Lincoln spent 13 months during the course of his presidency, including the night before his assassination.

The cottage was part of a soldier’s home complex which, sadly, shifted from retired soldiers to active ones by the time Lincoln got there. opened to the viewing public yesterday.

It’s little known despite the notable amount of time Lincoln spent there, and has only recently been restored by the private National Trust for Historic Preservation. They took an usual approach in that they kept it quite bare bones. They didn’t try to recreate it as it would have looked to the president, packed with furniture and whatnot. They’re going for atmosphere, for creating a feeling for Lincoln and the issues he was surrounded by in that house.

Then, because this is not a home filled with objects but a home with conceptual and biographical significance, it is treated as a kind of empty frame. The only way to see the cottage is as part of an hourlong 15-member group tour, with a guide explaining the issues that faced Lincoln during the crucial three summers that he lived here, from 1862 to 1864, while also sketching something about his character. Integrated into the tour are videos and re-creations of dialogue from documentary accounts.

In one room, for example, a single rocking chair is next to a small table. The guide sets up a scene based on an 1862 eyewitness report. Lincoln sits here, we are told, exhausted — overwhelmed by slavery debates, the war’s casualties and incessant demands — at the end of a day that offered little hope. An injured Union officer suddenly arrives, beseeching the president to help him recover his wife’s body — she died in a steamer collision — from a region closed off by the army. We hear Lincoln’s frustrated, angry voice: “Am I to have no rest? Is there no harbor or spot when or where I may escape this constant call? Why do you follow me out here with such business as this? Why do you not go to the War Office?”

It is a bit shocking. The sounds of impatience and frustration are unexpected, even if not unjustified; they undercut the reverent aura. Then we learn that the next morning Lincoln sought the man in his hotel, apologized, set the bureaucratic wheels in motion and asked him not to ever tell his children about the president’s shameful behavior.

I’ll be honest, it brings a lump to my throat just reading it, much more than bunches of furniture and paintings and documents under plexi would. This is definitely on my must-see list.

She was looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in April of 2003, along with thousands more artifacts from the Cradle of Civilization, 10,000 of which have yet to be recovered.

On a tip, Iraqi police and US troops found her buried in 6 inches of mud in someone’s garden, entirely unharmed.

Now on to the find the rest of the missing. Here’s hoping the authorities get at least 10,000 more dead-on accurate anonymous tips.

In a bit of a break with the traditional direction of these things, yesterday Greece returned two ancient statues of Artemis and Apollo that had been stolen from an Albanian museum in 1991.

The headless marble statues, one dating back to the 2nd century B.C. and the other to the 2nd century A.D., were handed to Albanian Culture Minister Ylli Pango in Athens today. They were recovered by the Greek authorities in 1997 and identified [6 years later] as having been stolen from the Butrint archaeological site in 1991.

The ceremony was heavily laden with commentary about the propriety of returning cultural patrimony to its rightful owner, and was held in the brand spanking new Acropolis Museum which just happens to have a place set aside for the Elgin Marbles should hell frieze over.

Active duty helicopter pilot Edward Earle Johnson was charged today with selling 80 antiques stolen from the Ma’adi Museum outside of Cairo.

On September 29, 2002, 370 pre-dynastic artifacts ranging in date from 3,000 to 5,000 BC were stolen from the Ma’adi Museum. Chief Warrant Officer Johnson was deployed to Cairo from February to October of 2002.

In January of 2003, Johnson contacted a Texas art dealer offering to sell him a group of Egyptian antiquities that he claimed he had inherited from his grandfather who had acquired them in Egypt during the 30’s or 40’s. Bummer about him not having a sliver of documentation to support this provenance, of course, but why should that stop an art dealer from buying 90 5,000 year-old Egyptian artifacts for the bargain basement price of $20,000?

Nor, heaven forfend, should the unsupported fiction inhibit Christie’s and a bunch of other galleries and collectors in New York, London, Zurich, etc. from purchasing some of the pieces from the dealer, a dealer later discovered by the feds to be an associate of Sotheby’s.

As of January, the feds had recovered 80 of the 90 artifacts Johnson sold. Who knows where the other 260 antiquities stolen from the museum have ended up. Johnson hasn’t been charged with the theft, just with the sale, so that means the feds don’t have much in the way of prosecutable evidence on who actually did the stealing.

God, the antiquities trade is so dirty I could just spit.

Yes, that’s right: free. The only other online program in archaeology I know of is the University of Leicester’s distance learning courses, and they’re both far more complex — book purchases, homework and final exams are involved — and far from free.

National Park Service Archeology Program, however, is easily accessible, entirely online, limited in scope to the ways and means of caring for archaeological collections, aka curating.

Much more broadly, this technical assistance is designed for the global archeological community — professional archeologists (e.g., university professors, CRM principal investigators and their staff, federal, tribal, and state agency staff), graduate students, upper level college students, and others concerned about archeological collections — who are rarely taught this material in formal educational settings. Because “Managing Archeological Collections” is created for primary access and use via the Internet, “global” is a key word here.

Cool, huh? Needless to say, I’m taking it. And even more needless to say, I’ll post all about it, especially the ethics sections. I have high hopes that a program by the NPS will take a firm stance on provenance issues, given how often looters target national parks for devastation in the name of profit.

An update to this entry about the family of antiquities forgers who were finally busted after years of successfully pulling the wool over experts’ eyes: Curtain falls on antiques rogue show as last of family forgers convicted.

The 84 year-old pater familias amusingly monickered the “Artful Codger” by the British press was sentenced to 2 years in prison, suspended. His 83 year-old wife got a year, also suspended. Their son, the guy who actually made the fake artifacts in their garden shed, got a 4 and a half year sentence, not suspended.

Their motivations are still something of a mystery. It can’t have been filthy lucre since they lived pretty low on the proverbial hog. The speculation is frustrated artistic talent driving them to mock the establishment, but the Greenhalgh’s ain’t talkin’.

Last week the Guardian knocked on the Greenhalgh front door to ask these questions. A lock rasped shut, a blind was drawn and from behind the frosted glass plane a woman shouted: “Go away or I’ll set the dog on you.”

I can’t help but like these guys. I’ll take a thousand skilled forgers over one looter, that’s for sure.