The returned artifacts include some recently seized in New York from a repository of British antiquities dealer Robin Symes, officials said. In addition, the lot delivered in Rome included 65 objects that belonged to the Menil Collection in Houston.
The Carabinieri paramilitary police art unit said the owner of the Houston collection “spontaneously” returned the objects when investigators determined they came from clandestine excavations of archaeological sites, according to a Carabinieri statement. The museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Italy has been carrying out a campaign for decades to recover antiquities looted by “tombaroli”, grave robbers who sell them to collectors and museums in different countries. Art dealers who sold the artifacts directly or through auctions were implicated in the looting.
Some items were handed over to Italian authorities on Tuesday at the offices of Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg. Among them was an Apulian krater, or vessel, from 335 BC seized from a private collection in New York.
The vase had been photographed for the notorious Polaroid “archive” of art dealer Giacomo Medici, who sent it to Symes and he “laundered the piece through (auction house) Sothebys in London,” Bragg’s office alleged.
Other objects are two Etruscan paintings from Cerveteri, a frequently looted necropolis northwest of Rome dating to 440 BC.
These were looted in the 1980s and found their way to Symes, who sold them to noted New York collectors Shelby White and Leon Levy in 1992 for $1.6 million. The couple returned the paintings to Symes before 1999, when numerous scholars began asking questions “about their illicit provenance,” according to the statement.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
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