Seventy-one percent of the antiquities had no published provenance, or ownership history, meaning they could not be traced to previous collections, exhibitions, sales, or publications. Most of the provenances were weak, such as anonymous private collections, or even prior Sotheby’s sales. None established that any of the artifacts had entered the market legally, that is, that they initially came from archaeological excavations, colonial collections, or the Cambodian state and its institutions. While these statistics are alarming, in and of themselves, fluctuations in the sale of the unprovenanced pieces can also be linked to events that would affect the number of looted antiquities exiting Cambodia and entering the United States. This correlation suggests an illegal origin for much of the Khmer material put on the auction block by Sotheby’s

Carpaccio's 1515 "Young Knight in a  Landscape", Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

It has been suggested that this new format can be explained if this image were a posthumous portrait of a soldier, in which case the figure would be similar to funerary images of a comparable type and date. The landscape around this enigmatic young man is as mysterious and troubling as he is, combining as it does flowers and animals that refer both to good and evil, purity and corruption.

In addition to paintings from the Stroganov collection, the Lepke auction of May 12-13, 1931, featured two Lucas Cranach paired canvases, Adam and Eve, from the Art Museum of the Ukraine Academy of Sciences in Kiev. 

Cranach paintings often included Adam and Eve, but the existence of the canvases put up for the 1931 auction was unknown well into the late 1920s. The paintings had been found under a staircase in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kiev in 1927, then moved to the museum of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (monastery); in 1928, on the initiative of Prof. S. O. Gilyarov, the paintings were given to the Academy museum in Kiev (in 1929 Gilyarov published an article in Ukrainian about the paintings; it included a brief synopsis in French). The newly discovered Adam and Eve were sold in 1931 to Dutch collector Jacques Goudstikker, whose remarkable personal collection numbered more than a thousand old master paintings and about a hundred old master sculptures.

Dear Reader, 

I would like to introduce you to my colleague at ARCA, the new co-editor the Journal of Art Crime, Marc Balcells. 

Marc started paying attention to art and cultural heritage crimes in 2009, when he moved to New York City, thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship. Never, in his wildest dreams, he would have imagined that, as a criminologist, his research interests would have led him there. However, the more Marc reflects about how things unfolded in his career, the more he realizes it were meant to happen. 

First of all, Marc studied Law in his city, Barcelona. In the several Criminal Law courses he took there was no mention to art crimes whatsoever, even though the Spanish Criminal Code punishes this form of crime in several of its articles. By 2001, after four years of law school, and being twenty one, he specialized in Criminal Law, but again, there was no mention of cultural heritage crimes in that Masters program. No art thieves in his list of prosecutions, either.

I would like to introduce you my colleague at ARCA, the new co-editor of The Journal of Art Crime, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis (University of Cambridge).

Christos owes his passion for fighting looting to his parents, Perikles and Athena. They were the ones who, as early as 1977, presented him with images from the discovery of Phillip II tomb, Alexander's the Great father, in Northern Greece, Macedonia. They were the first who indicated to young Christos the scale of the destruction that could have been made if the looters had come first... 

Since that day, Christos has known that he would become an archaeologist. Working as a specialized excavation technician throughout his undergraduate years at the University of Athens, he first acquired a B.A. in Archaeology and History of Art. With several years of excavation experience, he started working as an archaeologist at the ancient Agora of Athens, before becoming a reserve officer for the Greek Army. Even there, archaeology continued to be part of his life, as he discovered two ancient settlements (in Crete and on the Greek-Albanian borders) and an ancient cemetery in Macedonia. Delivery the antiquities and indicating their find spots to the Greek Archaeological Service, Christos Tsirogiannis was awarded with a medal from the Greek Army and a contract to continue his career as an archaeologist, after the completion of his army service.

Following in the steps of many other books depicting the loss of cultural heritage during World War II (whose examples include Lynn Nicholas' The Rape of Europa or Harclerode and Pittaway's The Lost Masters, among others), Ilaria Dagnini Brey's book traces the fate of Italian works of art that suffered during the armed conflict. An Italian journalist herself, Mrs. Dagnini Brey traces, with a complete array of documentation, the history and the impact of World War II in Italy, especially in its cities, filled with monuments, museums, historical buildings and archives. The book covers only particular cities: of course writing a book with the vast amount of information on cultural heritage in every corner of Italy would be a work fit for an encyclopedia, and not just a single volume. 

One of the assets of the book is its establishment of a very solid base setting the scene: path of Italy's entrance to the war is clearly delineated. But instead of giving only a historical account of the events, the author establishes, from the very beginning, the links to cultural heritage and the policies taken to prevent the possible damage. In order to do so, the main characters are carefully introduced, and the main cities that configure the book's landscape are clearly laid from the very beginning (Padua, Rome, Florence...). Out of these characters, for the reader who has previous knowledge of the subject, the Allied Monuments Men will echo from others (mostly Edsel's two previous books, Rescuing Da Vinci and The Monuments Men). However, without downplaying their role, the book also abounds with Italian characters who have been mostly unacknowledged, and are fully explored in it.

Followers of Robert Edsel's previous books can rejoice, as a new one has appeared on the market: after Rescuing Da Vinci and The Monuments Men, Saving Italy follows his previous books related to World War II and the destruction of cultural heritage, and the task that the Monuments Men conducted in order to save, in this case, Italy's cultural heritage. 

This book relates much to its predecessor, The Monuments Men (Rescuing Da Vinci follows a mostly illustrated, coffee table book format), as it traces the work of the Allied officers from England and the United States into Italy, as the German forces retreated. The book follows a chronological order in four parts: the inception, struggle, victory and aftermath of the Monuments Men.

In October of 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in accordance with his plan to resurrect the ancient Roman Empire and restore dignity and prosperity to the Italian people. Emulating his imperial predecessors, who crowned their military victories by looting and plundering the sacred treasures of the conquered peoples, Mussolini personally ordered the removal of one of the monumental obelisks of Axum to Rome as war booty. The mammoth 1,700 year old monument, a potent symbol of Ethiopian independence and national identity, was inextricably linked to the Ethiopian's heritage, a cherished symbol of a sophisticated civilization that had once rivaled that of Rome. Mussolin's appropriation of this emotionally charged symbol unequivocally conveyed his message to the world that Ethiopia was now Italian. While Italy was soon forced to relinquish its brief "place in the sun" with the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, the looted obelisk would remain in Rome for another sixty-eight years, an unsettling reminder of Italy's fascist past and an ongoing insult to Ethiopian sovereignty. Delays over its restitution spawned a controversy that was only resolved in 2005, when the last segment of the obelisk was finally returned to its homeland. The saga of the restitution of the Axum obelisk reflects current debates over repatriation of artifacts seized as war booty by colonial powers, and provides an encouraging example of how, after years of injustice, the fabric of peace and friendship can be rewoven when countries respect each other's cultural heritage.

We begin this new, regular column on the underworld of antiquities trading with a follow-up to my article in the last issue of JAC (Spring 2013), 'A Marble Statue of a Boy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts'. 

[...]

Facts and Evidence 

An Apulian Gnathia askos with a spout formed in the shape of a woman's head appears in 2 Polaroid images (nos. CD 3, racc. 82, pag. 31, foto 6 and CD 3, racc. 82, pag. 32, foto 2) from the confiscated archive of the convicted antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici. The vase is depicted uncleaned, standing on a large, creased white sheet of paper, reassembled from various fragments, missing the entire left side of its rim and various chips of clay from its neck and shoulder.