Illicit Antiquities
Research Centre
against the theft & traffic
of archaeology

A disputed cuirass: Italy versus the Netherlands’ National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden

Jos Van Beurden

Utrecht
The Netherlands
jos.vanbeurden@inter.nl.net

Culture Without Context

Issue 18,
Spring 2006

At the 1997 TEFAF, the prestigious art fair in the Dutch city of Maastricht organized annually by the European Fine Art Foundation, a curator of the NMA discovered an object which would be a welcome addition to the museum’s collection. In the stand of a well-known Swiss antiquities dealer, there was some ancient bronze armour comprising a cuirass, a helmet, fragments of a belt and two leggings. The NMA collected money and purchased the cuirass in early 1998.

In 2000, the Italian authorities demanded in a criminal procedure that the NMA should return the cuirass to Italy. The NMA supplied what information it had on the cuirass to the Italian authorities, but that did not bring the two parties any closer to one another. In 2002, Italy started a procedure against the NMA on the basis of European Directive 93/7, which provides for the return of a cultural object that has left the territory of a member-state unlawfully. According to the Italian Carabinieri, the cuirass had come from a clandestine excavation; the Carabinieri even knew the name of the place and that it had been exported illegally.

On 9 June 2004, a court in the Dutch city of The Hague decided the evidence offered by the Italians was far too meagre and rejected their claim. The Italian case had been based on a note of 9 October 1999 made by two sergeants of the operational section of the Carabinieri, which had been in touch with a ‘confidential source’. The note said ‘it seems that some years ago in the illicit trade a complete cuirass … surfaced. According to him, the cuirass was taken up by an important dealer in archaeological objects in Puglia … The important armour seems to have been purchased by a museum abroad’. Based upon further investigations in Switzerland and the Netherlands, Italy concluded that it was this cuirass that had been purchased by the NMA.

The Italians know the Swiss dealer quite well. The Carabinieri had in the past questioned him about other objects, but they had never been able to prove their suspicion that he is not always careful enough about the provenance of objects, and that every now and then he is involved in the ‘laundering’ of objects with a dubious provenance.

The Italians also knew that the NMA had been criticized by Professor Colin Renfrew, then Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, UK, for exhibiting a selection of unprovenanced antiquities from the collection of the Miho Museum in Japan. Some media had questioned this exhibition as well.

For these reasons, the Italians did not want to show the report of their investigation to the NMA, not even after repeated requests. The NMA stated that after the acquisition its conservation expert had not found any evidence that might allow the place of excavation to be deduced. In law, the NMA had not done anything wrong.

Colonel Dr Fernando Musella, head of the operational section of the art crime squad of the Carabinieri, whom I recently met during a congress on art crime in Rotterdam, complained that the Dutch judge ‘had insufficient understanding of the illicit trade in art and antiquities’. Dr Musella was pointing to the problem that much smuggled art from Italy is laundered in Switzerland and that it is extraordinarily difficult, and particularly so in the case of archaeological objects, to prove that they have been stolen and smuggled. Moreover, most of the earth adhering to the cuirass had been removed.

Equally, the NMA was not amused with the attitude of the Italians, who according to the head of the museum’s collection management, Steph Scholten, ‘did everything with a lot of fuss and display of power. They tried to criminalise the NMA’. At the same time Scholten could ‘well imagine the dilemmas and frustrations of the Italians. With hindsight maybe that purchase was naïve.’

The NMA thought that the Carabinieri, who visit TEFAF most years, would have seen the cuirass and was surprised that the Italians did not take any action at the time of the fair in 1997. When the NMA began to think about purchasing the object, it asked the Swiss dealer for further information about the object, and checked the data base of the Carabinieri. It did not, however, directly contact the Italians. ‘With the standards of 2005 one can say that information could have had more substance’ says Scholten, and now we also know more about the role of Switzerland in the illicit trade. In the National Museum of Antiquities one had been thinking for a long time that the illicit trade was something of shady back rooms and not something of prominent traders in prominent places. Now I understand that things happen even at the TEFAF which should not be allowed as far as provenance is concerned. 

With the decision of the Dutch judge the case between Italy and the NMA seems to be over. But while this might be true from a legal point of view, the same cannot be said from the perspective of museum ethics. The NMA reproaches the Italians, and Scholten says that ‘with their power display and doing everything through lawyers’ they have shut the door on a dialogue. In 1998 the NMA knew less about the illicit trade than it does now. Their assumption ‘that the museum had been willing to help the Italians in their investigation’ was not really picked up in Rome. At the end of 2004 the Italians once more demanded the return of the cuirass, but again, without result.

The Dutch court case must have served as a warm-up for the actions that followed against museums, dealers and collectors in the USA, and possibly other countries too. The Italians will no longer have to complain that judges do not fully understand their cases and museums such as the NMA will be more prudent in the future. Apparently, the cuirass was of less cultural and historical importance than the pieces claimed from major US museums.

First posted December 2006