In 2009 or 2010, three looted sculptures were taken from the ancient city of Palmyra. Several years later, customs officers in Switzerland seized them at a Geneva freeport. At last, they’re heading home to Syria, the Art Newspaper reports. The three sculptures date back to the second and third centuries B.C.E., when Palmyra was still a nexus of trade, possibly during the rule of ...
A Cambridge University college handed over a bronze cockerel looted from Africa in the 19th century to Nigerian authorities on Wednesday, as part of a modest but growing effort in some European countries to return African art taken by colonial powers.Jesus College is the first U.K. institution to give back one of the artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes. British colonial forces took the ...
Ahead of their long-awaited repatriation to Benin, 26 looted objects will go on view for one last time at Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly before departing France for good. The five-day special presentation opens on Tuesday and comes ahead of a planned return set for early November. The objects were stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892 by members of the French military. ...
In August, Taliban forces swept across Afghanistan and ultimately took over the capital city Kabul. In the weeks since the insurgency, international heritage and culture organizations have suspended most projects in Afghanistan while also closely following the dire status of the country’s ancient art, archaeology, and architecture. Concerns over the plunder and smuggling of relics—common throughout the Taliban’s previous regime—is high. In response, 12 ...
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal for the restitution of a painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro stolen by the Nazis in 1939. The work has been on display for decades at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which has argued throughout the years-long legal dispute that the painting was acquired in good faith. Prior rulings have been split over whether ...
Neil Perry Smith, a British antiquities expert, has been charged for possessing and restoring 22 stolen objects from India, Cambodia, Thailand, and Nepal. The news was announced on Tuesday by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, which said that the works were worth a collected $32 million. The 58-year-old restorer was extradited to the United States from London. Cy Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, ...
Artifacts looted by British forces in the 19th century have been pulled from auction following an appeal by the Ethiopian government to the English auctioneers to “stop the cycle of dispossession.” The Guardian first reported the news. The Ethiopian embassy in London wrote to Busby, an auction house based in Bridgeport, after discovering the items among the lots headed to the block on June ...
More than two dozen looted artifacts were returned to Cambodia by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., on Friday, in a move that officials said was intended to restore cultural heritage to the country. The 27 repatriated artifacts are estimated to be worth $3.8 million. Among the objects returned were statues of Shiva and Buddha, as well as artifacts dating back to Cambodia’s Angkor ...
Since its completion in 1563, Paolo Veronese’s 32-foot-long painting The Wedding Feast at Cana had been an object of admiration—an image with religious resonance for the monks of Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore who came before it and a picture filled with aesthetic significance for the countless artists it inspired. But by September 1797, it existed in a bizarre in-between state, something more like war booty. That year, Napoleon’s ...
The Bavarian State Painting Collections have restituted a painting by 19th-century Austrian painter Joseph Wopfner looted by the Nazis. Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, one of Bavaria’s state-run galleries, told the German press agency dpa that the painting, Fischerboote bei Frauenchiemsee (1884), was bought by Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann in 1924 for the Reich’s Munich headquarters. Bormann, Hitler’s functionary, was among the highest-profile war criminals arraigned ...
