Antiquities Returned to Europe Include 16 Seized From the Met

New York Times

07-08-2025

Thirty-four antiquities that were deemed looted, including 16 seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been returned to Italy, Spain and Hungary, New York investigators announced on Wednesday.
Among the items seized from the Met and returned to Italy was a terra-cotta krater, an ancient Greek vessel used for mixing wine and water, that had come to the museum in 61 fragments over two years in the 1990s.
'The Met is committed to the responsible collecting of art and the shared stewardship of the world's cultural heritage,' the museum said in a statement, 'and has made significant investments in accelerating the proactive research of our collection.'
In recent years, investigators and some experts have identified the use of fragments as a smuggling strategy employed by looters and dealers hoping to avoid detection after governments began cracking down on looting in the 1970s.
On the face of it, the identification of dispersed fragments to reconstitute ancient artifacts, at least partially, seemed a remarkable testament to the skilled art of conservators. But experts and investigators say that in some cases the frequent arrival of pottery shards that fit with those already in museum collections was far from serendipity. Those fragments, the experts and investigators say, were easier to sneak out of countries than intact antiquities.
'Their history,' the Manhattan district attorney's office said in a statement about the krater fragments seized from the Met, 'illustrates the complex lengths to which smugglers will go to traffic their looted antiquities — breaking objects into fragments to sell the pieces individually and bringing these pieces to market over the course of several years.'
Other experts doubt this theory, saying ancient vases are rarely found intact but can be reconstructed legitimately through diligent, methodical work by researchers using special databases. Those experts also say that looters do not have the patience for long unfolding schemes that would not generate the price equivalent to an intact artifact.
In the past three years, the Met has returned two other classical Greek drinking cups to Italy after investigators asserted that they too had been looted.
Those cups had been reconstituted by the Met's conservators from fragments that were donated or sold to the museum in small batches from several sources over a period of more than 15 years, beginning in 1978. Three of those people were later associated with the sale of looted antiquities.
The fragments making up the krater that was returned passed through the hands of three dealers including Robin Symes, who died in 2023 and was long suspected by investigators of being involved in trafficking.
The krater fragments were not fully reconstituted and the vessel remained in fragmentary form. The Met said the krater, which dates to 580 B.C., was transferred to Italy but would remain on loan to the museum. (Loan agreements have become a tool for museums looking to hold on to important items at a time when many countries are seeking the return of their cultural heritage.)
In recent years, the Met and other museums have faced increasing scrutiny from law enforcement officials, academics and the news media over the degree to which their collections include looted artifacts.
After a number of high-profile seizures from the Met, it announced in 2023 a new research effort to investigate its holdings with the intention of returning items that it determines to have problematic provenance. As part of its expanded efforts, it appointed a former Sotheby's executive, Lucian Simmons, to a new position as head of provenance research.
The 34 objects that were recently returned include two harness pendants dating to the sixth century that were seized from the Met and repatriated to Spain; the objects sent back to Italy included two sculptures that were most likely created in Egypt before being brought to Italy during Rome's occupation of Egypt. The item returned to Hungary was a 17th-century Jesuit manuscript seized from a rare books dealer this year, investigators said.
In a statement, Fabrizio Di Michele, consul general of Italy in New York, welcomed the 31 objects that investigators had returned to the country.
'These items — stolen, illegally unearthed or clandestinely exported — hold an estimated value of over $4 million and are of immeasurable scientific and cultural importance for our country,' he said.
Among those items was a first-century marble head depicting Alexander the Great that investigators said was stolen from a state-run archaeological museum in Rome.
Its repatriation follows a seven-year legal battle by the Safani Gallery in New York after the marble head was seized by the district attorney's office in 2018. The gallery had opposed the seizure and sued Italy and its ministry of culture.
Leila Amineddoleh, an art market lawyer who represented Italy in the case, said the return made 'it clear that you can't sue a foreign government for regulating the movement of its cultural heritage that is protected via a patrimony law.'
She said the resolution of the case would help ensure that countries are not pulled into lawsuits 'when governments are simply working to protect their artistic and cultural legacies.'