![]() ![]() (Under the 1970 Unesco Convention on the illicit movement of cultural property, signed by the US in 1983 and Britain in 2001, a buyer of stolen antiquities must return the items, even if purchased in good faith.) A collector later donated the acroliths to the University of Virginia’s Art Museum, which returned them to Italy in 2008. Acroliths were statues generally made with wooden trunks and marble heads dating from 530 to 520BC, this is one of the oldest in the Western world and is widely believed to have been looted from the ancient Greek site of Morgantina in Sicily along with another acrolith. ![]() One treasure is the head and extremities of a Morgantina acrolith. And many represent the culmination of decade-long investigations and groundbreaking cases. With or without their context, however, the pieces in the exhibition – including ancient sarcophagi, sculptures, vases, frescoes and more – are invaluable. Without knowing where the piece was found, at what depth, or near which other objects, it is all but impossible to fully reconstruct the piece’s history, use and meaning. (One popular way to transport looted vases, for example, is to deliberately break them into shards and reconstruct them later, as fragments are easier to hide and move.) The irreversible loss is the item’s context. One display points out that when an item is looted, the problem isn’t just that it risks disappearing into the hands of a private collector, winding up abroad or being damaged. ![]() The exhibition, which includes dozens of works of art, serves as a sobering reminder of how widespread and damaging looting in Italy has been. To illustrate the extent of the problem, the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s police force, has recovered 874,163 archaeological works and 2,416 paintings in the past two years. Running until 5 November, Capolavori dell’archeologia: Recuperi, ritrovamenti, confronti (Masterpieces of archaeology: Recovery, findings, comparisons) displays pieces looted, stolen or illegally exported from the country, and celebrates those who succeeded in returning some of the art world’s most contentious antiquities. In a new exhibition at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, an imposing fortress-turned-state museum, visitors get the chance to see top-notch antiquities and artefacts that – had events unfolded differently – might never have been on public display, especially not in Italy. ![]()
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