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Ancient Vase Comes Home to a
Hero’s Welcome
Journalists and officials at a ceremony for the
return of the Euphronios krater to Rome.
The Euphronios krater, returned to Italy by the
Metropolitan Museum, was unveiled on Friday.
As the restless crowd
applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the
heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s
welcome here on Friday.
When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met
in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of
a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been
plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for
information on its provenance.
This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one
of 21 treasures turned over by the Met under the terms of a
pathbreaking 2006 accord.
As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the
state attorney’s office, Italy’s
culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from
Homer’s “Iliad” illustrated on the vase’s main panel. The
Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received in
the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos
(Death) bear him home.
The event was held at the attorney’s office to underscore the
persistence of the Italian lawyers who have lobbied for the return of
antiquities from American museums, dealers and private collectors over
the last three years.
“In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate
something positive,” said Italy’s attorney general, Oscar Fiumara.
(The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this week: the
justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an
appearance at Rome’s main university; and Naples is submerged in
trash.)
In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in
Los Angeles, Boston and Princeton, N.J., and with the private
collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this week
transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with
other institutions in the United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr.
Rutelli said on Friday.
But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special
place, symbolizing the war against clandestine tomb-robbing and
illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony. So the
general mood was victorious.
“The Italian state has won,” said Rocco Buttiglione, the former
culture minister who initiated the talks with the Met just over two
years ago and took part in the ceremony. “This is a success
story.”
The vessel is to go on view on Saturday at the Quirinale, or
presidential palace, where 68 other artifacts recovered from museums
through similar accords are grouped in an exhibition titled “Nostoi:
Recovered Masterpieces.” (Nostoi is ancient Greek for homecoming.)
Fewer than 30 vases by Euphronios, one of the greatest artists of
ancient Greece, are known to have survived. The krater returned by the
Met dates from around 515 B.C. and is considered one of his finest
achievements.
Italian archaeologists have traced most of the existing Euphronios
vases to Cerveteri, known as Caere in Etruscan times, an area of steep
slopes and raised tomb chambers.
Caere was also “a privileged market for red-figure production,
and Euphronios in particular,” said Maria Antonietta Rizzo, an
archaeologist whose research on Euphronios persuaded the J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles to return a rare kylix, or drinking cup, by that
artist in 1999. That piece is signed by Euphronios as the potter, and
by his protégé Onesimos as the painter.
Italian court records based on a state investigation say the Met
krater was dug up in the Greppe Sant’Angelo area, near Cerveteri, in
December 1971 by a gang of tomb robbers. After that, the records say,
it passed through the hands of a convicted Italian antiquities dealer
and then was sold to the Met by the American dealer Robert Hecht, who
is on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted
antiquities. He denies the charges.
If a memoir seized by law enforcement officials during a 2001 raid
on Mr. Hecht’s Paris apartment is to be believed, the krater arrived
in style in New York in 1972, in its own first-class seat on a TWA
flight from Zurich. (Mr. Hecht now discounts that memoir as fiction.)
It returned to Italy on Thursday in somewhat more modest
circumstances: a blue box in the cargo hold labeled “Handle With
Care.” A few hours after Friday’s ceremony, the krater was
transported to the state television network, RAI, and paraded on an
evening broadcast, with the culture minister and a news anchor sitting
proudly nearby.
“Euphronios could never have imagined that one day he’d find
himself featured” on the 8 o’clock news, Mr. Rutelli said on live
television. “We are proud to be at the forefront of the battle to
fight looted antiquities.”
January 19, 2008
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