Italian police recovered tens of thousands of artifacts in 2009, the Associated Press reports. Recovered items include 2,000-year-old frescoes, statues, and decorated vases. Last year, authorities recovered or seized nearly 60,000 artworks and archaeological artifacts, worth €165 million ($239 million), that had been looted or stolen.
That compares with €183 million in stolen or looted art and artifacts recovered in 2008, a decrease of 14.5 percent. The number of illegal archaeological excavations discovered in 2009 also decreased dramatically compared to 2008.
Yet, the number of people charged with falsifying artwork has risen by more than 400 percent. The commander of the Carabinieri’s art squad, Giovanni Nistri, said most of the fabrications were of modern art, “probably because the art of today is easier to falsify with fewer technicalities.”
In all, Italy recovered 39,584 looted archaeological artifacts and 19,043 other culturally important works, including entire libraries, in 2009, officials said.
Among them were 137 artifacts returned to Italy from Switzerland which had been in the possession of Zurich-based restorers Fritz Burki & Son.
Burki is known for having restored the Euphronios krater, one of the finest ancient Greek vases in existence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased it for $1 million in 1972 from an art dealer later accused of acquiring looted artifacts. The vase was returned to Italy last year.
Over 100 antiquities have now been returned to Italy from a range of North American public and private collections. A study of the returns by archaeologists David Gill (Swansea University) and Christopher Chippindale (Cambridge University) has identified the role of Burki.
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts returned a marble statue of Sabina that it had acquired from Burki in 1979. At the time it was stated that the statue had resided in the collection of a Bavarian aristocratic family. Another item was an Apulian amphora attributed to the Darius painter. Research by Ricardo Elia (Boston University) has demonstrated the devastating impact of looting on the ancient cemeteries of Puglia to supply Apulian pottery for the antiquities market.
The J. Paul Getty has returned several items supplied by Burki. Among them were two Athenian pots, one an elaborate drinking cup with a mask. The Getty returns included several items, including Apulian pottery, acquired by Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. At least one of the pieces is reported to have been identified by a Polaroid image seize during police raids on a warehouse facility in the Geneva Freeport. A fragment of Roman wall-painting also came from Burki. Maxwell L. Anderson recognized that this came from the same composition as a fragment in the Shelby White and Leon Levy collection (that has also been returned to Italy).
