Photo Friday! This week Susan Sanders brings us images of an extraordinary exhibit called Nostoi that’s being held at the Palazzo Poli, near the Trevi Fountain. The exhibit showcases archaeological artifacts returned (or recovered by Carabinieri) to Italy from museums in the United States and elsewhere after being illegally excavated, exported, and sold. (The exhibit was formerly hosted in the Palazzo Quirinale - it’s now moved.)
Among the artifacts on exhibit (and shown here in Susan’s photos) is the stunning Euphronius krater, a 2500 year old Greek red-figure vessel, which Italy regained after signing a deal with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Euphronius krater — a large vase painted with scenes related to Homer’s epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” — is regarded as one of the finest examples of its kind, a fact that was immediately recognized by the (then) director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, when he fell in love with the calyx krater at first sight in 1972. He effused about the vase in his 1993 book, Making the Mummies Dance:
The Euphronios krate is everything I revere in a work of art. It is flawless in technique, is a grand work of architecture, has several levels of heroic subject matter, and keeps on revealing something new at every glance. To love it, you only have to look once. To adore it, you must read Homer and know that the drawing is perhaps the summit of fine art. Truly, the calyx krater is one of those rare pieces that is legitimately the perfect object of adoration for botht he neophyte and the art snob.
What was not so legitimate about the vase was the way in which it was excavated and the way in which Thomas Hoving went about purchasing it in the early 1970s. The vase was probably looted from an Etruscan tomb in Cerveteri, an archaeological site just to the north of Rome. It seems then to have been smuggled out of Italy before Hoving agreed to pay a million dollars for the antiquity, bending and break rules and laws in the process.
After years of negotiation with the Met, the museum agreed to return the vase to Italy. The deal that was eventually sealed with the New York museum in February 2006 called for the return of the vase by mid-January 2008. The museum also agreed to return 20 other antiquities.
In the meantime, American art dealer Robert Hecht — who sold the vase to Hoving in 1972 — has been put on trial in Rome, charged with knowingly acquiring allegedly looted ancient artifacts. He denies wrongdoing.
The vase and other returned antiquities are on show in the Palazzo Poli, at Via Poli 54, until 7 September, after which the exhibit will move to Athens, Greece.
For more photographs by Susan Sanders, visit her photo blog: Rome With A View.
