Innocents Abroad

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The New York Sun

The spectacle of Philippe de Montebello, the great director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dealing with the Italian government on disputed ancient artworks reminds us of Mark Twain’s account of being guided through a museum and shown two skulls in a case. The large one, he was told, was that of Christopher Columbus. The smaller? It was, the guide explained, that of Christopher Columbus when he was a little boy. The guide might as well have been the Italian minister of culture claiming patrimony of the Euphronios krater.


The krater is the most famous of the disputed works in the Metropolitan’s collection. The 2,500-year-old pot depicting a scene from Homer has graced New York since the Met acquired it in 1972, but under the agreement Mr. de Montebello inked yesterday, the krater may, at the end of a loan period expiring in 2008, have to return to Italy. That may or may not be good news for Italians, but it is certainly bad news for New Yorkers and the art world as a whole, since it marks another step in the advance of the dubious notion of “cultural patrimony.”


Controversy has swirled around the krater since its acquisition. It appears to have been taken during the robbery of an ancient tomb in 1971, before fetching $1 million from the Met in 1972. Even the director of the Met at the time, Thomas Hoving, now says he was suspicious of the work’s provenance when the museum bought it, and a fierce dispute among some curators prompted the departure of one, who returned to a different post after a long lawsuit. The Italian government has been pursuing the case from various angles for three decades.


In this and other similar cases, Italians have been trying to enforce a Mussolini-era law, passed in 1939, that declared that any antiquities not in private hands before 1902 belonged to the state; therefore, by definition any artifact taken out of the ground since the law’s passage belongs to the government. In one of the many ironies in this story, 1939 is the same year Mussolini’s Italy invaded Albania, and Ethiopia is still pursuing the Italian government seeking the return of Ethiopian treasures plundered by the Italian fascists in the 1930s. Its own dubious provenance notwithstanding, however, the law remains on the books.


The Italian law is a manifestation of an idea that has been gaining currency ever since, the concept of “cultural patrimony.” In 1970, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, itself a flawed institution, approved a “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,” asserting “it is essential for every State to become increasingly alive to the moral obligations to respect its own cultural heritage.” To that end, the convention focuses on curbing the free international trade in art and artifacts.


Yet the Euphronios krater itself is an example of the complicated knot of “cultural patrimony.” Italy now claims the vase because it was looted from within the borders of the modern Italian state. But that state did not exist as recently as 150 years ago. Arguably, the Vatican would have just as much right to it, on the grounds that it’s part of the cultural patrimony of what used to be the Papal States. Then again, the territory was once in the heart of the Roman Empire, the most recent manifestation of which was based in Constantinople until the fifteenth century. One could just as well argue that the vase should actually be going to Turkey.


In its own day, the painting on the vase was a depiction of a Greek myth painted by a Greek, so maybe the krater belongs in Athens. As a professor of philosophy at Princeton, Kwame Anthony Appiah, recently wrote in the New York Review of Books in respect of Italy’s claim on the krater, “patrimony, here, equals imperialism plus time.” Italians are, in one sense, plundering yet again the treasures of a civilization their Roman forebears plundered more than two millennia ago.


The Euphronios krater does represent a cultural patrimony, but that patrimony is not Italy’s alone; the vase is an artifact of a culture that exercised a formative influence on the whole of Western civilization. Greek philosophy shaped Western views on science and religion for thousands of years, and still shapes America’s government via a Constitution drafted by Founding Fathers with a keen interest in ancient Greek ideas about politics. The krater itself is currently housed in a building the neoclassical facade of which was inspired by Greek architecture.


For people throughout the West, and beyond, for that matter, relatively easy access to the remnants of ancient Greece is an indispensable tool for making sense of Western civilization. The Italian government’s use of Mussolini’s law to mount a raid on New York does not only New Yorkers but the rest of the world a disservice. It’s hard to fault the hapless Mr. de Montebello, who seems to be doing the best he can, as Mark Twain did when he was abroad. But the lesson will be that the only time these priceless objects are safe is when they are in the hands of private owners prepared not only to protect them but to fight for their rights. As the turbulent history of the Euphronios krater itself demonstrates, co-opting any past and future finds for the state is not an effective way of doing that.


The New York Sun

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