Greek Vases in New Contexts

Book Review: Nørskov, Vinnie, 2002. Greek Vases in New Contexts: the Collecting and Trading of Greek Vases — an Aspect of the Modern Reception of Antiquity.

Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 407 pp.

David Gill

Department of Classics and Ancient History
University of Wales Swansea
Singleton Park
Swansea

Dr John Disney, the founder of the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge, once compared the discovery of fine Greek pottery (‘fictile vases’) in the cemeteries of Etruria to the finding of truffles (Gill 1990). Greek Vases in New Contexts is a major study of the phenomenon of collecting, displaying, and selling these tasty and expensive treats — Greek figure-decorated pots (‘vases’) — from the fifteenth century onwards. It ranges from the explorations of Campanian cemeteries by Sir William Hamilton to the display of (replica) Greek vases in the Florida villa of Italian fashion-designer Gianni Versace. There are six main chapters that include ‘The history of collecting Greek vases’, ‘Vases for sale: trade and restrictions’, ‘Vases in museums: case studies’, and ‘A look at the market: availability or choice’.

gkvases.gif (212968 bytes) At the heart of the study is an important discussion of eight European and North American collections of Greek pottery: the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (see now also Chippindale et al. 2001, 20–22), the National Museum in Copenhagen, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the Antikensammlung Kiel, Antikenmuseum Basel und Sammlung Ludwig, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Duke Classical Collection. The impact of the Code of Practice by the (British) Museums Association can be seen in the Acquisition Policy for both the Ashmolean Museum (p. 220; see also Vickers 1992) and the British Museum (p. 128). This contrasts with other museums which are not bound by such clear rules: ‘no firm guidelines’ (National Museum, Copenhagen; p. 142), ‘a general reluctance to acquire objects without secure provenance’ (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, p. 178). Some of the donors behind the expansion of the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (p. 165) are individuals whose collections have been the subject of study elsewhere (Chippindale & Gill 2000, 472–5): it is clear that these private collections have been formed from newly-surfaced antiquities. The importance of Greek pottery as part of a wider university ‘art’ collection can be illustrated by the purchase of the Greek vases once owned by the traveler William M. Leake in 1864. This in effect initiated the important collection of Greek pottery held by the Fitzwilliam Museum in the University of Cambridge, supplementing the founding gift of sculpture by John Disney in 1850 (compare p. 204 table 11 which gives the date 1848; see Gill 1999). In Oxford, 82 per cent of the antiquities acquired by the Ashmolean Museum during the 1930s consisted of Greek pottery (Chippindale et al. 2001, 21). The problem of forming a new collection of Greek pottery has been highlighted by the San Antonio Museum of Art (Shapiro et al. 1995). Not one piece from the 183 catalogued items comes with a stated provenance, and at least 86 per cent of the pots had surfaced since 1974 (Chippindale & Gill 2000, 479, especially supplementary tables 20–21).

One significant feature of Nørskov’s study is the quantification of the pottery surfacing on the antiquities market. Over 18,000 Greek pots from 596 catalogues were registered from auction and other sales between 1954 and 1998. This sample suggested that 80–90 per cent of the pots surfacing had no previous history (‘provenance’) suggesting that they were recent finds (p. 259). This is consistent with other studies, of the London antiquities market (Chippindale et al. 2001, 19, ‘just under 90 per cent of objects offered for auction in the survey since World War II first "surfaced" in the sale itself’), and of Apulian pottery (Elia 2001, 147, ‘some 94.5 per cent of all recorded Apulian vases have been unearthed without the benefit of systematic archaeological investigation’). It would have been helpful to have a more nuanced analysis of when the individual pots with some history first surfaced. The most expensive 20 Greek pots sold at auction between 1969 and 2000, were worth more than $15 million (p. 356 appendix C). How many of the collections listed were in fact of recent formation? One piece even appears to come from the realization of an antiquities investment portfolio. For example a pelike from the Embiricos collection — a collection represented in the top 20 — was sold at auction in 1993 but ‘it did not have the documented history necessary for acquisition by the British Museum’ (p. 130). In the top twenty were 5 pots once owned by the Hunt brothers, sold for $3.8 million. This collection was once presented as ‘The Wealth of the Ancient World’ (Tompkins 1983). This raises the intellectual consequence of how modern monetary (and aesthetic) values are placed on ancient pottery, which we know from ancient commercial graffiti was in fact a humble medium (Vickers & Gill 1994). The unwillingness of contemporary ‘vase’ scholarship to recognize this tension between modern interpretation and the ancient evidence, perhaps reflects the way that ‘vases’ have been robbed of their original archaeological contexts. All that scholarship can now provide is a superficial art-historical interpretation with attributions to anonymous pot-decorators, a situation not dissimilar to that for Cycladic figures.

One area which could have been explored is the movement of Greek pottery from the cemeteries of Etruria to Switzerland, and then on to the auction rooms of London before being acquired by private collectors and museums (Watson 1997). The unmasking of this route led Sotheby’s to discontinue its antiquities operation in London (in spite of what has been said by a certain London dealer to a House of Commons Select Committee: Gill & Chippindale 2002, 54), though all that has happened is that it has moved the selling of antiquities onto the internet (see now Chippindale & Gill 2001). Peter Watson identified the role of Giacomo Medici, who also appears as one of the dealers behind the Hunt collection (p. 270 n. 55). A future study should attempt to identify the pots handled by Medici, and perhaps acquired by unsuspecting museums and collectors in good faith believing that they came from ‘old European collections’. Nørskov’s index of personal names will also help to identify the validity (or otherwise) of such ‘old’ collections. gkvasesback.gif (206924 bytes)

The tables showing numbers and percentages of Greek pots on the market between 1954 and 1998 will provide the basis for future research. The low figure for East Greek pottery (59 pots) may suggest that the cemeteries of Turkey and the Greek islands have yet to be looted in the systematic way of the Italian cemeteries. The quantification of the South Italian pottery is not dissimilar to the histogram created by Ricardo Elia for ‘Sotheby’s South Italian pottery sales, 1965–1998’ (Elia 2001, 149, fig. 18.2), though Nørskov has highlighted a further South Italian peak in 1990. Interestingly Attic pottery has ‘highs’ in 1985 and 1990: 1990 is the year of the Nelson Bunker Hunt and the Erlenmeyer sales (p. 275, table 15).

Nørskov has identified a number of material consequences for the collecting of Greek fine pottery, though the nettle of intellectual consequences was not, perhaps, grasped. For pots attributed to ‘the Berlin Painter’, only some 13 per cent comes a relatively secure archaeological context, and 50 per cent have no archaeological context at all. This has implications for the interpretation of the development of style and the dating of associated material, as well as the understanding of the funerary function of pots attributed to this hand.

References

Chippindale, C. & D.W.J. Gill, 2000. Material consequences of contemporary classical collecting. American Journal of Archaeology 104(3), 463–511. Supplementary tables available from www.ajaonline.org.

Chippindale, C. & D.W.J. Gill, 2001. On-line auctions: a new venue for the antiquities market. Culture Without Context 9 (Autumn), 4–13.

Chippindale, C., D.W.J. Gill, E. Salter & C. Hamilton, 2001. Collecting the classical world: first steps in a quantitative history. International Journal of Cultural Property 10(1), 1–31.

Elia, R.J., 2001. Analysis of the looting, selling, and collecting of Apulian red-figure vases: a quantitative approach, in Trade in Illicit Antiquities: the Destruction of the World’s Archaeological Heritage, eds. N. Brodie, J. Doole & C. Renfrew. (McDonald Institute Monograph.) Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 145–53.

Gill, D.W.J., 1990. ‘Ancient fictile vases’ from the Disney Collection. Journal of the History of Collections 2(2), 227–31.

Gill, D.W.J., 1999. Winifred Lamb and the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, ed. C. Stray. (PCPS suppl. vol. 24.) Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 135–56.

Gill, D.W.J. & C. Chippindale, 2002. The trade in looted antiquities and the return of cultural property: a British parliamentary inquiry. International Journal of Cultural Property 11(1), 50–64.

Shapiro, H.A., C.A. Picón & G.D. Scott (eds.), 1995. Greek Vases in the San Antonio Museum of Art. San Antonio (TX): San Antonio Museum of Art.

Tompkins, J.F. (ed.), 1983. Wealth of the Ancient World: the Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt Collections. Fort Worth (TX): Kimbell Art Museum.

Vickers, M., 1992. Recent acquisitions of Greek and Etruscan antiquities by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1981–90. Journal of Hellenic Studies 112, 246–8.

Vickers, M. & D.W.J. Gill, 1994. Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Watson, P., 1997. Sotheby’s, the Inside Story. London: Bloomsbury.

First posted March 2004; Page design updated September 2006