ROME — Italy celebrated the return of three stolen
ancient terra-cotta figures, depicting “Orpheus and the Sirens,” in a ceremony
Saturday at Rome’s newly inaugurated Museum of Rescued Art.
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Until this year,
the figures — which date to around 300 BC — had been on exhibit at the
J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. But Italian carabinieri officers in the country’s
art theft division uncovered incontrovertible proof last year that the
sculptures had been illegally excavated from a site in southern Italy, and the
museum agreed to return them.
The head of the
carabinieri art theft division, Gen. Roberto Riccardi, said Saturday at the
ceremony that two moments from the investigation stood out. The first was in
March 2021, when two lieutenants in his squad had come into his office to
report that a suspect in an ongoing investigation had come clean. The statues,
the suspect had told the officers, had been excavated by tomb robbers in the
early 1970s in a town close to Taranto, in Puglia.
The second moment
of note, Riccardi said, was exactly a week ago in Los Angeles, “at the Getty
Museum, where the work had ended up.” “To see this work being packed up was
truly one of the greatest things of my life,” Riccardi said.
“Orpheus and the
Sirens” will be on temporary exhibit at the Rome museum, conceived as a
showcase for repatriated art, before becoming part of the permanent collection
of Taranto’s archaeological museum.
“I can’t help but
think that in 10, in 100, in 1,000 years, someone will go to the museum in
Taranto will see the statues in their rightful place,” said Riccardi. Art can
and should be seen everywhere, he said, “but it has to be done legally.”
In the 53 years
since the carabinieri art squad was founded, it has recovered thousands of
artifacts stolen from churches, museums, private homes, and libraries, and
uncovered countless fakes. In the past two decades, many archaeological
artifacts have been recovered from museums and private collections worldwide,
including some in the United States, often purchased at a time when due
diligence was not strictly applied to determine whether their provenance was
legal.
This month, the
Manhattan’s district attorney’s office seized 27 ancient artifacts valued at
more than $13 million from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York,
asserting that the objects had all been looted.
The New York
investigators — along with the carabinieri, prosecutors in Taranto and the US
Homeland Security Department — were also involved in the return of the “Orpheus
and the Sirens” statues. The three statues were returned to Italy along with
142 looted artifacts that had mostly belonged to billionaire industrialist
Michael Steinhardt and the Royal-Athena Galleries in Manhattan.
The life-size
terra-cotta figures had been acquired by Getty himself in 1976, Getty museum
officials said, and his diary indicated he paid $550,000. Officials said
Saturday that the work had been valued at $8 million.
The expertise,
knowledge and success of the carabinieri “is something that Italy should be
very proud of,” Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said Saturday.
Stéphane Verger,
director of the National Roman Museum, who oversees the new Rome museum, said
the figures of “Orpheus and the Sirens” were about to begin “a new life,”
starting with their display at the museum, which differed from how they had
been shown in Los Angeles.
At the Getty, the
three statues had been exhibited side by side. In Rome, the figure of Orpheus
has been placed facing the two sirens, to better explain “the sense of the
work,” Verger said.
In Greek mythology,
the sirens lured sailors to their death with their song. But Orpheus, traveling
with a group of Argonauts, helped them safely sail past the sirens by loudly
playing his lyre and singing.
“It’s a moment of
confrontation,” Verger said. The revised reading of the three figures had
become “possible as a result of the recovery,” he said.
Franceschini said
it was imperative for looted works of art to return to their place of origin
because they are “central to the identity of a territory,” he said. “When they
return home, it is a moment of great celebration, of great pride, and it will
be the same in Taranto, when they welcome ‘Orpheus and the Sirens’ with open
arms.”
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