![]() ![]() Revisions to the Association of Art Museum Directors guidelines over nearly 20 years have reiterated that responsibility.ĭespite that, the industry is facing a reckoning for the sins of its past. But since the 1970s, they have been expected to ensure the provenance and legal export of items. While the laws regarding national patrimony are not new, museums’ understanding of them and adoption of standards meant to help them responsibly acquire artifacts have evolved over the decades. ![]() “What is absolutely a sickness is that you start applying things that have come up today to a market of 20, 30, 40 years ago.” What do they know about what I sold? Absolutely nothing. “They were never excavated illegally or they might have been excavated illegally but that was before I bought them, and that no one will know,” Almagià says, from Italy where he lives. ![]() With each seizure, museums face more scrutiny for their role in providing a market for such antiquities and accepting them - either by purchasing them or as gifts or loans - without ensuring their provenance and legality. On the other end of his business, Almagià used his relationships with museum curators and collectors to sell items that now have been returned. law enforcement in 2006 serve as key evidence against him, Bogdanos says. Almagià’s own “meticulous” records seized by U.S. In court records and an interview, Bogdanos alleges that Almagià worked with tombaroli, or tomb raiders, who looted the items from archaeological sites in Italy before falsifying documents to export them. Under a 1909 Italian law, antiquities are the cultural property of the state, making items excavated illegally or exported without documentation stolen goods. “This guy got away with it for so long, and anyone who has any respect for the rule of law has got to say, ‘Enough.’”Īlmagià joins a growing list of dealers whose objects acquired years ago are being repatriated to their modern countries of origin. “If Almagià is the first name on your provenance, it is stolen,” Bogdanos tells PAW. Led by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, who heads the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, the office has repatriated more than 200 Almagià antiquities to Italian law enforcement. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, working with the Italian government, has executed search warrants across the United States over the past two years in the homes of private collectors, in galleries, and in museums, including the Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM). Now, though, hundreds of his items have been returned to Italy and Almagià is the target of an ongoing investigation. His network grew and eventually antiquities sold, loaned, or donated by Almagià appeared in museums across the United States. In receptions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, he met collectors and museum curators who would purchase the antiquities for a few hundred or few thousand dollars. “Everybody was doing it.”įrom his base in New York, Almagià found eager buyers. “Do you think I was the only one buying from the free port?” he tells PAW. Where they came from and how they got there, Almagià says he didn’t ask. ![]() They were often purchased, Almagià says, in open markets, a common practice when he started as an art dealer in the 1980s. He gathered terra cotta objects, including one of a galloping centaur.įar from great masterpieces, the items represented the everyday of antiquity. He procured marbles of Aphrodite’s torso and a child’s sarcophagus. A love of antiquities that started in his childhood grew into a career, with Almagià acquiring mostly small objects from more than 2,000 years ago.įrom dealers, restorers, and collectors in Europe, he obtained pottery with red-figure and black-figure paintings depicting scenes and myths. For decades, Edoardo Almagià ’73 sought the remnants of ancient civilizations. ![]()
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