Dear members,

After reading about the ongoing controversy in both the Italian and
English language newspapers between the Italian Ministry of Culture
& the Metropolitian Museum of Art, personally I feel that the
Italian government should have imposed a rather substantial monetary
fine on the Metropolitian Museum to cover the financial cost of what
the Italian Government & the Italian Ministry of Culture probably
spent on the investigation in regards to the unquestionable stolen
Italian artifacts in the collection of the Metropolitian Museum!

As for Prof. de Montebello, on the subject of restitution of stolen
Italian artifacts, he would be well too remember that even the
Papacy in 1815 was able to get the vast collection of art works
pillaged from the Vatican and Italy during the Napoleonic occupation
(1797-1811) returned to Italy, there is no reason why the Italian
Government and the Italian Ministry of Culture should do the same
now!

Besides, after reviewing the online web-site of the Metropolitain
Museum of Arts collection of Greeks & roman Antiquity's collection I
was not not impressed, there is relatively little education value
for the online viewer; The current display and educational value of
the Metropolitain Museum's Greek & Roman collection is best
summarized by the former Italian Art Historian Prof. Ranunccio
Bianchi-Bandinelli (1965), in which he said: "coltivati piu` al fine
di un prestigio personale, che non a quello della recerca."
("...Cultivated more for the purpose of personal prestige than for
the sake of research").

Thank you
Martin G Conde
Washington DC, USA
mgconde@...


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Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Derides Italy's Efforts To Claim
What It Calls Looted Art

By RUSSELL BERMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 7, 2006

Fresh from signing a deal to send 20 valuable antiquities across the
Atlantic, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last night
offered a sharp criticism of Italy's efforts to reclaim what it said
was looted art.

"The whole process of how Italy prosecuted its case in the United
States was shabby," the museum chief, Philippe de Montebello, said,
speaking before a packed New School auditorium at a forum on the
antiquities scandal that has rocked the art world. Mr. de Montebello
chastised the Italians for making their initial claims "entirely
through the press," saying that only after repeated requests by the
Met did cultural officials even agree to meet with the museum.
Mr. de Montebello, who has led the Met for nearly three decades,
also defended his decision to return the pieces, which included the
prized Euphronios krater and a 15-piece set of Hellenistic silver.
He cited "sufficiently incriminating" evidence Italian investigators
had compiled in the course of their prosecutions of an Italian art
dealer, Giacomo Medici, who has been convicted of trafficking in
looted art.

"If you pile up enough circumstantial evidence, you've got something
that's beyond a reasonable doubt," Mr. de Montebello said.
His comments came amid speculation that following Italy's successful
negotiations with the Met, Greece may be preparing claims of its own
for pieces in American museums. Greek officials could not be reached
for comment yesterday, and Mr. de Montebello told the New York Sun
that, as of yet, Greece had made no claims against the Met.
Earlier, Mr. de Montebello told the audience that while there would
be more claims for disputed pieces, "American museums have now shown
that they are willing to take them seriously." With an eye toward
future claims, the Italian cultural minister, Rocco Buttiglione, has
said he hoped the agreement with the Met would serve as a model.
Though transferring legal title to Italy, the museum will get to
keep the Euphronios on display until 2008 and the silver until 2010,
at which point Italy will replace the pieces with long term loans.
Last night's panel discussion on cultural property issues
highlighted the deep tensions between museums and archaeologists
over what to do with objects whose origins are not known. While
museum directors and some cultural scholars have said current
cultural property laws are needlessly restrictive, the
Archaeological Institute of America has called for even stricter
regulations on museum acquisitions and loans, saying they are
necessary to protect ancient sites from looting.

Mr. de Montebello did not shy away last night, engaging in a
spirited debate with another panelist, an archaeologist from the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, Elizabeth Stone. He
disputed Ms. Stone's assertion that most objects with unknown
provenance were looted, and challenged her to come up with a better
way of dealing with a disputed piece.

"Should we condemn it into oblivion or should we bring it into the
public domain?" Mr. Montebello said, echoing a point he made to
reporters at a briefing last month. "If you catch the poacher of an
endangered species, you put the poacher in jail, but you don't shoot
the animal. You put it in a zoo," he said then.

http://www.nysun.com/article/28672