Stolen artifacts on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are confiscated by the Manhattan DA
Stolen pieces of ancient artwork long on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been seized by Manhattan investigators and will be returned to their rightful owners, the Daily News confirmed on Friday.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has confiscated 27 antiquities from Upper East Side museum since February, authorities said. Of those, 21 were from Italy and six were from Egypt.
Among the items seized were a marble head of Athena dated to 200 B.C. and valued at $3 million. The DA also found a white-ground terracotta cup attributed to the Villa Giulia Painter that goes back to around 470 B.C., and is valued at $1.5 million, according to the July 11 search warrant shared with The News.
Also included was a bronze South Italian-Corinthian helmet from the mid-4th to mid-3rd century B.C. and worth $125,000.
The plundered pieces set to be returned at a set of repatriation ceremonies next week tally to an estimated $13 million, according to the DA’s office.
“It should be no secret to collectors, art museums and auction houses that they may be in possession of pieces from known traffickers that were illegally looted. The investigations conducted by my office have clearly exposed these networks and put into the public domain a wealth of information the art world can proactively use to return antiquities to where they rightfully belong,” Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said.
A spokeswoman for the Upper East Side institution said the Met has cooperated with the DA and that each of the stolen works had “unique and complex circumstances.”
“The museum is a leader in the field in comprehensively reviewing individual matters, and it has returned many pieces based upon thorough review and research – oftentimes in partnership with law enforcement and outside experts,” the spokeswoman said.
“The norms of collecting have changed significantly in recent decades, and The Met’s policies and procedures in this regard have been under constant review over the past 20 years.”
The Met’s haul of stolen goods included eight pieces it acquired from notorious Sicilian antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina, prosecutors said.
Becchina was convicted in Italy in 2011 of dealing illicit antiquities, most of which were stored and displayed at his former gallery and warehouse in Basel, Switzerland. In 2014, a swiped sculpture that Swiss and Italian authorities found records about in his Swiss gallery turned up at a climate-controlled storage facility in Long Island after it was featured in a Park Ave. art exhibition.
The ancient Roman marble sarcophagus lid with a high-relief sculpture of a sleeping woman was dated to 200 A.D and was valued at around $4 million.
State prosecutors worked with the feds to uncover some of the Met’s stolen items, according to the Manhattan DA.
In August, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan announced that more than a dozen sacred sculptures of extraordinary cultural significance, dating from the Bronze Age to the 12th century, would be returned to Cambodia.
Most of those pieces were looted from temples and palaces in the late 20th century during a long civil war and trafficked into the international art market by networks affiliated with the Khmer Rouge regime.
