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Illicit Antiquities |
Familiar route out of Italy for looted ivory headCecilia Todeschini & Peter WatsonMcDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
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One of the world’s rarest and most important looted antiquities has been recovered by Italian police in London. The object, a unique life-size ivory head, is thought to be of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, and perhaps dates from the fifth century bc. But it could be more important still: the ivory is of such superb quality that Italian archaeologists who have examined the head, believe it may have been carved by Phidias, one of the greatest of classical Greek sculptors, whose carvings graced the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Pliny, Pausanias and Lucian all sang Phidias’ praises but not a single work of his has survived. The head was seized from the London antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who has premises in Ormond Yard, St James’. A fragment of a fresco, stolen from a villa near Pompeii, was also recovered at the same time.
Besides the face, which has its eyes, straight nose and sensual lips intact, a series of fragments was also recovered — fingers, toes, an ear, some curls of hair. In antiquity, it was the practice for exceptionally important statues to consist of ivory heads, hands and feet, with bodies of stone or wood, which were covered in gold sheets. Such objects were known as Chryselephantine sculptures, after the Greek for gold and ivory. Ivory was so expensive in antiquity that only emperors and other major figures could afford such statues. Mr Symes is no stranger to controversy, or to the Carabinieri. In the early 1990s he sold a statue of the Greek god Artemis to an American collector who, when he attempted to sell it on openly through Sotheby’s in New York, found that the sculpture had been stolen in 1988 from a convent near Naples. After a complaint from the Italians, that too went back to Italy. And in 1997, as part of an exposé of Sotheby’s, published in The Times, and on Channel 4 Television, in which it was shown that the auction house was selling smuggled goods, it was also revealed that Symes had, in conjunction with the salesroom, arranged for an Egyptian statue of the god Sekhmet to be smuggled out of Italy, to London, via Switzerland. The ivory head and other fragments were originally discovered in 1995 by Pietro Casasanta, a tombarolo (or tomb robber) of Anguillara, north of Rome, on the shore of Lake Bracciano. Mr Casasanta granted us an exclusive interview and agreed to be photographed in the field where he discovered the statue. The site is a few hundred yards from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius, and Casasanta told us that he believes the statue came from a large, luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman Emperor, Claudius. At the time he found the mask and fragments, Casasanta also discovered three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green and one in black granite, and some pieces of mosaic. ‘This was obviously the residence of a very rich, very important family,’ he said. Photographs of the three statues were found by police at Casasanta’s home when he was raided. These statues are still missing, though Casasanta believes one is in London. Mr Casasanta is no stranger to controversy either. Since he began digging illegally, in 1960, he claims to have discovered about a hundred villas (he does not, he says, plunder tombs) and, before finding the ivory head, his greatest claim to notoriety was his discovery, in 1970, of L’Inviolata, a large settlement, a temple cult, which he says contained 63 statues, 25 of them life-size. He returned to L’Inviolata in 1992 when he discovered the famous ‘Capitoline Triad’, a six-ton marble statue of three seated gods — Jupiter, Juno and Minerva — that is now in the Palestrina National Archaeological Museum, southeast of Rome. This is the only marble sculpture in which the three gods of the Triad are intact. The Triad was recovered by the carabinieri in 1994 after a two-year ‘Operation Juno’. For that discovery, Mr Casasanta was sent to prison for a year. A rough, portly 65-year-old, and a wheezy chain-smoker, he invited us into his home in Anguillara itself, where we drank wine from a table made of looted Roman marble. A large picture of the looted Triad hung on the wall. He told us that he usually pays an ‘entrance fee’ of ‘about 25 million lire’ (roughly £9000) to the owners of land for permission to dig, and in addition promises the landowner a share in any profits. Casasanta said that the minute he set eyes on the ivory head he knew it was the most important object he — or any other tombarolo — had ever found. He smuggled the head and fragments, and the three statues, out of Italy himself, and sold them to Nino Savoca, an Italian dealer based in Munich. They agreed a fee of $10 million. Savoca, he says, showed the head to two American museums, one of whom attributed it to Phidias, but neither of which was willing to risk buying such an obviously looted object. Following this, Savoca stopped paying him after $700,000, and they fell out. Savoca died in 1998 and, during a raid on his premises, police discovered documentation that helped them close in on a number of important looted antiquities. Partly because Savoca had reneged on payment, possibly calculating that the Carabinieri had him in their sights again, Casasanta volunteered to the art squad that Savoca had sold the ivory head to a London dealer who, he told us, was ‘a homosexual whose partner died recently’. Mr Symes’ male Greek partner died in an accident in 1999, when he fell down in a villa in Tuscany and hit his head on a radiator. Mr Symes was unavailable for comment. Professor Antonio Giuliano, emeritus professor of Greek and Roman art at Rome University, who has examined the statue, which is now at the Central Institute of Restoration in Rome, provisionally dates the ivory to the fifth or fourth century bc. He considers the main head to be of Apollo, and he thinks that the associated fragments are from a second, somewhat smaller statue, possibly Artemis or Atona (the toe, for example, is on a smaller scale than the head). He doesn’t rule out that the artist was Phidias. With Praxiteles, Polyclitus and Lysippus, Phidias was the greatest of ancient Greek sculptors. Born about 500 bc, he died some 70 years later. He or his pupils were responsible for many of the marble reliefs on the Parthenon, and for two colossal — and colossally important — ivory and gold statues that were the talk of classical Greece and Rome, and have been wondered about ever since, because they have been lost. These were the Athene Parthenos — the Virgin Athene, dominating the Parthenon itself (it was 34 feet high) — and an equally huge statue of Zeus, in his temple at Olympia. This statue was said to be larger than anything, except the Colossus at Rhodes and, like the Colossus, was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. Phidias’ great gold and ivory statue of Zeus, seated, with a figure of Victory on his outstretched right hand, which stood in the main hall at Olympia, was taken to Constantinople and burned in a palace fire in ad 475. Ivory sculptures, even in antiquity, were extremely rare. Dozens of fragments are known, and some small statuettes. But only one other life-size figure is known to have survived in Italy, found at Montecalvo (again, near Rome), and now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. And only one set of life-size Chryselephantine sculptures survives in Greece. This includes statues of Apollo and Artemis at the Delphi Museum. They were unearthed by French excavators in 1939 in the so-called Halos Deposit at Delphi, in a cache that had been damaged by fire. They have since been restored. But whereas the Delphi Chryselephantine figure is from the archaic period (c. 550 bc), the head just recovered has more refined features and details, and is therefore more likely to date from the classical era of Phidias. Many of Phidias’ sculptures were copied by Roman artists (this is one reason why we know how the original Athene Parthenos looked) but usually they were much smaller and made entirely of marble. The fragment of fresco returned with the ivory statue shows a satyr pouring wine or water from a pitcher. It was stolen in the 1970s from Castellamare di Stabia near Pompeii. The recovery is a major coup for Lieutenant Colonel Ferdinando Musella, operational head of the Carabinieri Art Squad. The importance of the statue is underlined by the fact that Italian Minister of Culture, Giuliano Urbani, hopes to persuade the country’s President to display the head at his official residence, the Quirinale Palace. First posted March 2004; Page design updated September 2006 |
The seizure of the head comes after a long
investigation, lasting several years and ranging from Italy, to Cyprus, to Munich, to
London. In the final stages, a raid on the premises of a known dealer in smuggled
antiquities in Munich led two officers of the Italian Carabinieri Art Squad to London in
February 2003, where they took possession of the antiquities from Symes’ lawyers,
Peters and Peters. Symes himself is currently