Dutch Museum Returns Looted 3Rd-Century BC Sicilian Vase

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The University of Amsterdam's Allard Pierson Museum has returned a richly decorated Sicilian vase dating from the third century BC to Sicily. This restitution occurred nine years after Italian police initially requested its return.

The lidded ceramic vase, known as a Centuripe pyxis, was transferred to Sicilian authorities last week. The museum acknowledged that the object's provenance was“problematic.” It had been acquired in 1997 at the Tefaf art fair in Maastricht from a Swiss art dealer. The dealer had asserted that the vase had been in private hands since before 1970, the year the UNESCO convention prohibiting illicit trade in cultural property was established. However, subsequent research disproved this claim.

Although the Netherlands only ratified the UNESCO convention in 2009, meaning the Allard Pierson was not legally obligated to return the object, Rogier Kalkers, the head of provenance research at the Allard Pierson, stated that the museum felt a moral responsibility.“Instead of waiting for source countries to knock on our door, we changed our approach,” Kalkers told The Art Newspaper.“We approach source countries when we find in our provenance research objects that are of problematic provenance.”

The vase, which depicts ancient gods like Apollo observing a wedding, is believed to have been interred in a rock-cut tomb near Centuripe, a Sicilian trade hub allied with Rome. During the 1970s, grave robbers targeted these tombs. An image of the vase was later found on a roll of film belonging to a local photographer, who apparently had been commissioned to document recently excavated items for the thieves. Another photograph on the same film reel showed a group at a wedding in Centuripe in 1976, refuting the Swiss origin story. The discovery of this film reel prompted Italian authorities to file the restitution claim in 2017, which the Allard Pierson then honored.

The vase will eventually be displayed at the Centuripe Regional Archaeological Museum. Kalkers views this not as a loss, but as the beginning of a new collaborative relationship.“We might have lost the ownership of one object in the collection but this is a stepping stone towards further collaboration, provenance research, more technical research into pigments and clays used in this type of ceramics, and inter-institutional loans in both directions,” Kalkers explained.“So we begin to see our role more as stewards of cultural heritage rather than owners of cultural heritage.”

Source: The Art Newspaper

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