New York's Metropolitan Museum is to
return 21 looted antiquities to Italy, the New York Times
reported at the weekend in the wake of the recent announcement
of the return of a famed Magna Graecia statuary group from the
Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Prosecutors in New York have been seizing the antiquities over
the last few months, the NYT said.
According to the investigators, eight of the pieces came into
the museum's collections via Gianfranco Becchina, a Sicilian art
dealer with a gallery in Switzerland who has been the focus of
several trials in Italy.
The works are worth some 13 million dollars.
Among them, valued at three million, is a colossal marble head
of Athena dated to 200 BC and a terracotta Etruscan kylix
attributed to the Painter of Villa Giulia that was made around
470 BC, and which the Met bought from Becchina's Basel gallery
in 1979.
Another piece, a terracotta stauette of a goddess dating to 400
BC, had been donated in 200 by Robin Symes, the British
collector involved in the sale of the colossal Venus of
Morgantina, acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 18
million dollars in 1988 and returned to Italy amid fanfare in
2007.
On August 12 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles said it would
return a famed and illicitly exported Ancient Greek statuary
group, Orpheus and the Sirens, to Italy.
The groups includes life-size terracotta figures of a poet and
two sirens, or mythical singing mermaids who lured sailors to
their deaths.
It was discovered in Puglia and dates back to the fourth century
BC, when Magna Graecia culture was at its peak in southern
Italy.
Italy had been seeking to get it back since 2006.
Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos recently proved that the
group was exported from Italy illegally.
The prosecutor's efforts also recently resulted in the return to
Italy of 142 other antiquities, mostly from the collection of
New York financier Michael Steinhardt.
Bogdanos specified that the Orpheus group had been seized from
the Getty, which had thus "left out half the truth" in
announcing its return.
Bogdanos also told ANSA that "we investigate people, not
museums," saying that other art dealers in the investigators'
cross-hairs included the notorious Giacomo Medici, and another
Italian antiquities merchant, Pasquale Camera.
Another six Ancient Egyptian works that were recently
confiscated will be returned to Egypt, prosecutors told the NYT.
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