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The Met returns its Euphronios vase!
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Featured February 21 , 2006
This world-famous Greek vase, a 2500-year-old krater for mixing wine and water, painted by Euphronios, has been The Metropolitan Museum's most prized antique since 1972, not long after it was dug up and stolen from a tomb in Cerveteri, a buried Etruscan site just north of Rome.
Now it's going back to Italy
 The Euphronios krater, Metropolitan Museum, NY. This world-famous Greek vase, a 2500-year-old krater for mixing wine and water, painted by Euphronios, has been The Metropolitan Museum's most prized antique since 1972, not long after it was dug up from a tomb in Cerveteri, a buried Etruscan site just north of Rome. Now it's going back to Italy, where the Museum's director, Phillipe de Montebello, and the Italian cultural minister will sign an agreement today allowing the Met to keep exhibiting it a while longer in exchange for returning the vase, along with four other hot pots and a set of stolen silver. The Italians have for years claimed the Euphronios vase was stolen, but the heat was turned up on the Met to return it during the current trial in Rome of Marion True, the now-resigned antiquities curator of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Robert Hecht, the American art dealer who had sold the vases and silver to the Met, for trafficking in stolen art. Hecht had bought them from Giacomo Medici, an Italian dealer convicted of antiquities trafficking in December 2004, whose trial turned up a memoir confiscated from Hecht's Paris apartment that corroborated accounts by Thomas Hoving, the former Met director, that the Euphronios krater had been dug up in the fall of 1971 from the Etruscan tomb. Hoving himself had long ago said he felt it was stolen. And at her trial, Marion True has sworn that Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met curator who had overseen the krater's purchase, had told her the precise spot in Cerveteri where it was found. Italian officials say von Bothmer may testity later this year in New York in their case against True and have not ruled out filing charges against him. According to this morning's New York Times, von Bothmer now denies True's account and says he did not know where the krater came from. The side seen here on Euphronios' krater is of Hermes supervising the burial of the fallen Trojan warrior Sarpedon by Hypnos and Thanatos. For an enlarged photo of this scene, and more on that story, click HERE |
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~ Table of Contents ~
TYCHE & OEDIPUS
Fatal Boar Hunts, Fatal Loves: Meleager & Adonis A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Fountains of Enceladus The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase The Moon-God Nanna-Sin Visits his Ziggurat at Ur Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms? Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades Aita, the Etruscan Hades Socrates' Apology: The Background THE GREEK SPHINX Hypnos & Thanatos, Sleep & Death The SPHINX and The ROBOT PYTHAGOREAN HARMONICS: FROM PYTHAGORAS TO NEWTON Orestes Pursued by Furies in The Eumenides |
