Showing 6 results for the tag: Paolo Giorgio Ferri.

July 23, 2012

How wikiloot could help to shut down the archaeological underworld

Posted at 12:55 pm in Similar cases

More coverage of the Wikiloot project – looking at the current problems of looting of ancient artefacts – and how some of the big networks involved in the illegal trafficking have been broken up because of chance discoveries.

From:
Swiss Info

Jul 18, 2012 – 11:00
Closing in on the archaeological underworld
by Michèle Laird, swissinfo.ch

Switzerland has been cleaning up its free ports after a 1995 scandal on its home turf triggered a probe into looted antiquities. Globally, the fight to disrupt such criminal activity is stepping up with a Web experiment to share information.

Museums the world over still display archaeological treasures that sometimes are not legally theirs. While governments wrangle over their rightful ownership, looters continue to plunder sites to feed a prospering black-market.
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March 30, 2012

Trial of Robert Hecht ends with no verdict

Posted at 12:48 pm in Similar cases

The trial in Italy of Robert Hecht, the art dealer suspected of selling many looted artefacts, has ended without verdict. The reasons for this result were similar to those that ended the trial of former Getty curator Marion True in 2010.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Italian case against antiquities dealer ends
January 19, 2012

The trial of Robert E. Hecht Jr., the alleged mastermind of an international black market in ancient art, ended with no verdict this week when a three-judge panel in Rome found the time allotted for the trial had expired.

Hecht, a 92-year-old Baltimore native now confined to bed at his home in Paris, has cut a wide swath through the art world since the 1950s, supplying museums and collectors around the world with some of the finest examples of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan art.
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February 1, 2012

Chasing Aphrodite – Italy’s attempts to reclaim their cultural patrimony

Posted at 5:51 pm in Similar cases

Another review of Chasing Aphrodite – about the Italian’s hunt for looted artefacts in the Getty Museum.

From:
Washington Times

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Chasing Aphrodite’
CHASING APHRODITE: THE HUNT FOR LOOTED ANTIQUITIES AT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MUSEUM
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28 384 pages, illustrated

The 19th century was the golden age of acquisition. European and American collectors, smitten with the lure of antiquities from Greece, Italy and China, spent recklessly to assemble great collections in London, Paris and New York. No one questioned that marbles from the Parthenon would get more careful attention in London than in Athens.

Then the tide began to turn. Italians became restless at the sight of their “patrimony” being exported abroad. In 1939, Italy passed a cultural property law stating that archaeological objects found after that date were the property of the state. In Athens, Greeks demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles.
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January 26, 2012

What went wrong at the Getty Museum – the hunt for looted antiquities

Posted at 2:16 pm in Similar cases

The Trial (without result) of former Getty curator Marion True has been covered here many times before. The book “Chasing Aphrodite” aims to retell some of this story, as well as the background to it.

From:
New York Review of Books

What Went Wrong at the Getty
June 23, 2011
Hugh Eakin

Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum
by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 375 pp., $28.00

1.

On August 5, 70 BC, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a remarkable criminal trial began in Rome. A young prosecutor named Marcus Tullius Cicero was accusing a senior Roman political official, Gaius Verres, of extortion and misrule during Verres’s tenure as governor of Sicily. “For three long years he so thoroughly despoiled and pillaged the province that its restoration to its previous state is out of the question,” Cicero proclaimed in his bold opening statement.
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November 17, 2010

An interview with former Getty Curator Marion True following her trial in Italy

Posted at 11:08 pm in Similar cases

Following the End of Marion True’s trial in Italy, she is now able to speak freely about the case. What is revealed in this interview suggests that the trial was far more of a political exercise than it was one specifically aimed at her. It also suggests that the Getty was quick to distance itself from the whole thing & jumped at the opportunity to write things off as the actions of a single person – an approach that suggests a complete lack of accountability within the Museum in terms of due diligence when acquiring artefacts.

From:
The New Yorker

October 14, 2010
Marion True on her Trial and Ordeal
Posted by Hugh Eakin

On Wednesday morning, in a Roman courtroom, the long-running criminal case against the former Getty Museum curator Marion True was dismissed. In less than ten minutes of deliberation, judges approved a motion by True’s lawyers to stop the proceedings—which, as I described in The New Yorker back in 2007, concerned classical art of allegedly illicit Italian provenance acquired by the Getty Museum in the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties—because the statute of limitations on all charges had expired.

It was a paradoxical end to a trial that has run for more than five years and has been a fulcrum of Italy’s efforts to reclaim major works from leading American collections. Since the trial began, no fewer than five museums—as well as several prominent collectors and dealers—have entered agreements to relinquish prize examples of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art to Italy. The American Association of Art Museum Directors has adopted strict new guidelines for acquiring antiquities (pdf), and many museums have all but given up on buying classical art.
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June 6, 2010

UK accused of selling looted treasures to pay tax bill

Posted at 9:31 pm in Similar cases

The British government is causing controversy by ordering various artefacts to be sold by liquidators to pay the tax bill of collector Robin Symes, despite the fact that, with no export licenses, it is likely that these artefacts were illegally looted from Italy.

From:
The Guardian

UK accused over sale of ‘looted’ Italian treasures to pay tax bill
Rome wants back the 3,000-year-old Etruscan artefacts that came into the hands of a dealer – but ministers aim to sell them
Dalya Alberge
Sunday 11 April 2010

Ministers have been condemned for forcing through the sale of up to 1,000 antiquities allegedly stolen from Italy, in order to pay the debts of a bankrupt private collector.

The Home Office has sparked outrage by allowing Roman bronzes, Etruscan gold and other treasures to be placed on the market by liquidators acting for the government in an attempt to recover unpaid taxes from the former owner, Robin Symes, a dealer with alleged links to the smuggling trade and a UK prison record.
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