The photographs recorded a 1979 wedding in Sicily: guests celebrating, a cake being cut, tables covered with presents.  Elsewhere, on the same roll of film, were archaeological objects, including the richly painted ancient vessel which is the subject of this article.  Decades later, those neighbouring frames would help expose the false collecting history attached to an ancient vessel sold to the Allard Pierson Museum, ultimately helping secure the vessel’s voluntary return.

On 7 October 2026, the Amsterdam museum voluntarily returned its third-century BCE Centuripe pyxis to the Sicilian authorities after having acquired the artefact almost thirty years earlier in a ceremony attended by the assessore (regional minister) and the Director-General of the Assessorato dei beni culturali e dell'identità Siciliana, staff from the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale as well as  staff from the Allard Pierson, the Dutch Information and Heritage Inspectorate and Dutch National Police.  The museum's decision to voluntarily relinquish the vessel followed an interesting research path that ultimately undermined the account supplied when the painted vessel was purchased, exposing the distance between an antiquity’s reassuring circulation history and condemning evidence of its illegal exportation.

The star shaped city of Centuripe

This pyxis takes its name from Centuripe, the Sicilian town whose ancient workshops produced this very rare and distinctive form of polychrome pottery.  Its elaborate painted decoration includes a bridal scene, Apollo, and winged figures associated with love.  These types of fragile vessels have often been interpreted through their wedding imagery, but archaeological comparisons suggest the vessels were used for funerary purposes.  The museum’s own research considers this example likely to have been placed in a chamber tomb as a burial gift.  Unfortunately, its precise excavation context has been lost.

In 1997, the Allard Pierson purchased the pyxis at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, from the Swiss antiquities dealer Herbert Cahn.  As the acquisition history records, it was one of three Centuripe objects bought by the museum with funds from a bequest, alongside a lekanis, and a small plaque depicting a woman.  

At the time of its acquisition, Cahn stated that the pyxis originated from a private Swiss collection dating back to before 1970.  Afterward's the museum's new antiquities were celebrated in an article written by H.A.G. Brijder, titled 'Polychrome Bridal Gifts from Centuripe', in its June 1998, no 71 issue of the Mededelingenblad (newsletter) of the Association of Friends of the Allard Pierson Museum. 

Unfortunately, what the museum had acquired in aesthetic and scholarly interest was not matched by refined provenance inquiry.  No export permit or supporting ownership records accompanied the object's sale substantiating its legitimate circulation and the museum's purchase seems to have been based solely on the seller's assurance that it had previously been in Swiss private ownership. 

Lucky for Italy, ordinary events recorded alongside a photo of this antiquity  provided a chronological reference against which the dealer’s provenance could be tested.

In 2016, the photographic archive of Antonello Catania, a local photographer in Centuripe, came into the hands of the historical society SiciliAntica which played an important role in identifying the illegal transfer of the 3rd century BCE Centuripe Pyxis.  In addition to other photographic assignments, Catania also seems to have been the great-nephew of a skilled forger and tombarolo of the time, Antonino Biondi.

Preparations for an exhibition brought attention to a series of images from the same roll of film which depicted antiquities among the photographer’s records of local life in Sicily.  Archaeologist Giacomo Biondi recognised the Amsterdam museum's pyxis in a series of images which show the artefact in a newly excavated state, and prior to its restoration and circulation with Herbert Cahn. 

Together, they placed the ancient vessel as still being in Sicily as late as 1979, a fact which directly invalidates Cahn's account.  So while these photographs do not give us an exact excavation date or reconstruct how this antiquity was removed from Sicily and transferred to Switzerland, it does expose the underlying central defect in the provenance cover offered by the dealer facilitating its sale. With this discovery, the purported old Swiss collecting history could no longer be accepted.

By 2017, these findings had prompted a request from the public prosecutor in Enna seeking the pyxis’s restitution.  Yet demonstrating the problems with an object’s history and compelling its return proved to be separate matters.  Dutch authorities considered the applicable legal framework insufficient to enforce restitution in this case.  The Netherlands had implemented the 1970 UNESCO Convention in 2009, a date far after the museum’s purchase, and the relevant provisions were not retrospective.

The museum eventually chose voluntary restitution on ethical grounds.  Before the handover, it also made the impending departure part of its public interpretation.  In From Centuripe, with Love, University of Amsterdam Museum Studies students examined the pyxis’s history and asked how a museum might say goodbye to an object it had displayed for years.  This exhibition gave visitors an opportunity to understand why an acquisition once celebrated could become a dialogue for responsibility and return.

The 2026 handover is therefore the outcome of more than just an institutional change of heart.  It rests on the preservation of a local archive, careful identification, the reconstruction of a chronology that the acquisition itself had lacked and public will. 

For those investigating looted antiquities, the case demonstrates why the seemingly incidental details in old photographs deserve attention.  A recognisable guest, a dateable celebration, or the sequence of images on a surviving negative strip can help establish a chronology of when an object was somewhere its market history says it should not have been.  Such evidence can survive long after dealers, like Herbert Cahn, have died, when transactions become difficult to trace, or where unsupported assertions have hardened into museum catalogue entries.

The pyxis spent almost thirty years in Amsterdam. Its supposed Swiss history did not become more reliable with age.  It remained an assertion awaiting scrutiny, until researchers in Centuripe found the photographs that allowed them to test it.