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.

In September 2013, the classical bronze statue known as the Cleveland Apollo went on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art, as part of a special focus exhibition, “Praxiteles: the Cleveland Apollo” (September 29, 2013-January 5, 2014). The statue had been purchased in 2004. The installation is accompanied by a fully illustrated handbook by Cleveland curator, Michael Bennett (Bennett 2013). This statue appears to represent the Apollo Sauroktonos, a work attributed to the classical sculptor Praxiteles. Its addition to the corpus of attributable works post-dates Aileen Ajootian’s study of Praxiteles (Ajootian 1996, esp. 116-22). Bennett makes a number of important art historical observations in his study, not least in the possible association of the statue with Delphi, and the more radical suggestion that Apollo is not skewering a “lizard” but rather the Delphic Python. But such points, though interesting and worth exploring, need not detain us here. (As an aside, the “lizard” is an important play of words in the ownership of a Roman marble copy of the Apollo Sauroktonos by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a work bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum: Darracott 1980, 120 [ill.]). 

Bennett has chosen to go beyond an art historical study of the statue to launch a strong-worded defence for the right of museums to acquire newly-surfaced works. There are two areas worth exploring at this point: first, the collecting history of the history and the supporting scientific analyses; second, the wider debate about collecting and archaeological ethics. 

The acquisition of the Apollo is placed by Bennett in the long tradition of collecting antiquities that can be traced back to antiquity; this is an area now explored by Margaret M. Miles (Miles 2008). The removal of cultural property from one location to another can indeed be traced to antiquity. During the second millennium BCE, looted Middle Kingdom Egyptian inscribed funerary sculpture can be found redistributed in the Sudan, Anatolia, and Crete (Gill and Padgham 2005). In modern times, Grand Tourists acquired classical sculptures in Italy and displayed them in their country houses (e.g. Haskell and Penny 1981). Thus the collection formed by Thomas Brand and Thomas Brand Hollis (and displayed at The Hyde in Essex, England) went on to become the core of the Disney bequest to the University of Cambridge (Gill 1990a; Gill 2004). The enlightenment values that placed such emphasis on classical sculptures can be found in the roots of the great encyclopaedic British Museum, the repository for world cultures (Wilson 2002). But should the “plundering” of sites like Tivoli to provide items for visitors to Rome be considered in the same way as the deliberate destruction of a temple to the Roman imperial cult in the late twentieth century, to generate bronze imperial statues for the market (see Kozloff 1987)? Is the “exploration” of tombs in the area round the Bay of Naples to yield items for the Hamilton collection (Jenkins and Sloan 1996) the same as the deliberate destruction of Apulian tombs using mechanical diggers in the late twentieth century (Graepler and Mazzei 1996; Watson 1997)?

An arrest was made this summer of a Romanian thief who seems to have been behind the heist of artworks, including paintings by Matisse, from the Kunsthal Museum in the Netherlands about a year ago. The arrest would have made small headlines, but for the fact that the mother of the thief claims to have burned at least one of the stolen paintings after her son’s arrest, in an attempt to destroy evidence and help him avoid prison. Unfortunately, the mother’s statement is believable, as she described accurately the way an oil painting on canvas would have burned in her oven (“like tissues”), and charred fragments of canvas with paint on them, that could match the stolen Matisse, were found just where she said they would be.

This is not the first time that a foolish and ignorant mother has made a son’s art theft crime far worse by destroying the stolen art. The mother of Swiss waiter and art kleptomaniac Stephane Breitweiser, who stole over one-hundred paintings and kept every one, never attempting to sell them but rather adding to a compulsive private art collection, destroyed a number of the stolen works when her son was arrested. She threw some in a canal, and shoved others down her garbage disposal. When her son heard this, he tried to kill himself, so distraught was he at the grotesque stupidity of destroying art—art that he loved and cherished, albeit stole. 

There are almost no known cases in the history of art theft of thieves knowingly destroying stolen art, even when it seemed clear that they did not know how to profit from it. In the majority of known cases, thieves in such a situation have simply abandoned the stolen art, rather than destroy it—for destroying benefits no one, hurts everyone, and turns a kidnapping into a murder. This was the case for the 2004 Munch Museum theft—when thieves failed to find a buyer, and failed to secure a ransom for the stolen Munch paintings, including a version of The Scream, they simply abandoned the works in a parked car on a farm outside of Oslo. Art is sometimes damaged or destroyed inadvertently—the best information to date on the stolen Caravaggio Palermo Nativity, taken from the church of San Lorenzo in Palermo by members of Cosa Nostra in 1969 (the theft of which prompted the foundation of the world’s first art police unit, the Carabinieri Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, in Italy), is that the Caravaggio was irrevocably damaged in an earthquake and subsequently fed to pigs, to destroy the evidence. But such stories are rare indeed, thank goodness.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss a specific case of the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage, namely the Jugha Necropolis, which used to be full of Armenian Khachqars (Cross-stones) in Nakhijevan, Azerbaijan. Khachqars are delicately carved stones decorated with cross/es and other unique ornaments. The Jugha Necropolis was far from the area of the armed conflict initiated by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh as a result of self-determination movement. A ceasefire agreement was concluded between Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan in 1994.

Every nation or ethnic group has its own unique culture which is enshrined in monuments and passed from generation to generation. Each site and historical monument constitutes a separate page of the world book of existence of humankind and its development. Every single cultural object tells us history, encompasses respect towards ancestors, and reflects invisible energy and belief in its own strengths. To have a future we need to preserve our past. Cultural Heritage is a mirror of humanity and reflects a genetic wisdom of a particular nation, it drives us forward to explore and satisfy a natural, but endless curiosity as to who we are and where we are going. Notoriously, during wartime (as well as peacetime) the objects of Cultural Heritage are easily accessible targets, which can be destroyed and simply erased from the surface of our planet at once. War, undoubtedly, is a tragedy for all of humankind irrespective of nationality, gender, political as well as religious views and beliefs. War is often started for different reasons such as territory, treasure, political regime, ideological and/or religious beliefs, etc. By the destruction of Cultural Heritage, parties to a conflict are knowingly try to harm and destroy the cultural identity of a rival as much as possible and forever. Very often, the same behaviour occurs during “pretended peace-time”, or within the so-called period of ceasefire, even in places far from the armed conflict. Tangible objects of cultural heritage can become the most vulnerable targets of destruction and realization of an opposite party’s goals. In such cases there are no winners. As a result, the heritage of the world is affected and pages of common history are lost and erased. Armenia is an ancient country with a rich and unique Cultural Heritage, dating from the 4th BC. Armenia has inherited 33.000 historical and cultural monuments, which are under state protection and are included in the State Heritage Register. What of Armenia’s cultural heritage which, due to some past historical event, is now located within the borders of another State? This too can be subject to destruction related to armed conflict.

"Hermes-Thoth" marble once passed through the hands of Robin Symes

Buyers of antiquities are rightly concerned about buying objects that can be identified from the seized photographic archives such as the Medici Dossier and the Schinousa images that related to Robin Symes. Institutional reputation is also a factor and auction houses are wanting to distance themselves from any perception of endorsement of the illicit trade in antiquities.

The Medici Pan withdrawn by Sotheby's

The Medici Pan in Sotheby's seems to be a totally different case; it appears to lack any collecting history before 1975 and Sotheby's may have to explain when this antiquity passed through the hands of Medici and why Sotheby's did not refer to Medici as part of the collecting history of the object. I am sure that soon we will find out more interesting things about the case of The Medici Pan. 

Although the Hermes-Thoth head was sold with a collecting history before 1970, it is yet to be proved if it is still protected by any bilateral agreements between the US and other countries or breaks any national legislation. One question that Sotheby's may have to answer is when did the object pass through the hands of Robin Symes and Christos Michaelides.

Symes Pan withdrawn by Christie's

Regarding the Christie's Pan (lot 114), Christie's may have to answer why they withdrew the antiquity if it has a documented collecting history before 1970 (at least since 1968)? 

I am sure that in due course, more information will be found and will become available regarding these three cases.

As usual, the auction houses don't quite care about the past. Important, for them, is only money. I think they are not very ethical. And, at the end, after Christos Tsirogiannis pointed out a few objects he recognized, they decided to withdraw two main objects: which was the minimum they could do.