In recent years, in addition to the pieces recovered from Michael Steinhardt (see here and here and here), the Manhattan DA’s office has seized and returned quite a number of looted ancient art, including a mosaic from a ship owned by the Roman Emperor Caligula. The New York Times first reported the raid. The text below, from McKinley (2017), details the story:
“The ceremonial ships that the Roman Emperor Caligula built
to host decadent festivities on Lake Nemi were ornate floating palaces, with
pink marble columns and brightly colored mosaic floors. Adorned with gold and
gems and bronze friezes of animals, they were the sites of mega-parties that
sometimes lasted days, according to historical accounts.
Caligula’s Mosaic originally recovered from the pleasure barge of the eponymous emperor on Lake Nemi in Italy. Picture credit McKinley (2017).
Two views of the Nemi ships under
excavation. Sources unknown.
But for much of the past five
decades, a four-by-four piece of mosaic flooring from one of the ships has been
sitting in a somewhat more prosaic setting, the Park Avenue apartment of an
antiques dealer, where it was used as a coffee table, often to hold a vase of
flowers and, occasionally, someone’s drinking glass.
Now investigators for the
Manhattan District Attorney’s Office are trying to sort out the journey of the
2,000-year-old piece of Roman history that was once dredged from the lake
outside Rome and somehow ended up in a private home in New York City. Last
month, prosecutors seized the mosaic, saying they had evidence it had been
taken from an Italian museum before World War II. On Thursday evening, the
piece was returned to the Italian government at a ceremony, along with two
other recently recovered antiquities.
“These items may be beautiful,
storied, and immensely valuable to collectors,” the district attorney, Cyrus R.
Vance Jr., said in a statement, “but willfully disregarding the provenance of
an item is effectively offering tacit approval of a harmful practice that is,
fundamentally, criminal.”
The antiques dealer, Helen
Fioratti, said she and her husband, Nereo Fioratti, a journalist, had bought
the mosaic in good faith in the late 1960s from a member of an aristocratic
family. The sale was brokered, she said, by an Italian police official famed
for his success in recovering artwork looted by the Nazis.
“It was an innocent purchase,”
Ms. Fioratti said in an interview. “It was our favorite thing and we had it for
45 years.”
Ms. Fioratti, who owns
L’Antiquaire and the Connoisseur, a noted gallery for antiques from Europe on
East 73rd Street, said she did not intend to fight the seizure because of the
expense and time it would take. Still, she said she believes she has a
legitimate claim to ownership. “They ought to give me the legion of honor for
not fighting it,” she said.
No charges had been filed against
her on Thursday, though the search warrant said investigators were looking for
evidence to support a charge of possession of stolen property.
The square piece of marble flooring
— which features a complex geometric pattern made of pieces of green and red
porphyry, serpentine and molded glass — dates back to Caligula’s reign, 37-41
A.D., and came from one of three enormous ships that he had built at Lake Nemi,
a circular volcanic lake where there was once a temple to Diana, the goddess of
the hunt.
Scholars have debated for years
whether the barges were purely pleasure craft or might have been floating
temples to the goddess. What is certain is they amounted to a haven for the emperor.
“They functioned as artificial
floating islands, where the emperor could retreat, being completely separated
from the world,” Francesco De Angelis, a professor of art history and
archaeology, at Columbia University, said in an email.
After Caligula was assassinated,
the ships were sunk, and remained underwater for centuries, despite efforts by
divers over the years to retrieve their treasures. Mussolini began draining the
lake in 1929 and by 1932, two of the ships had been located and hauled ashore.
In 1936, the Fascist government built a museum to display the artifacts,
including the complete mosaic and a few other smaller fragments, according to
experts. At the end of the war, however, partisans opposed to the government
set fire to the museum, which had been used as a bomb shelter, damaging many of
the artifacts.
Manhattan prosecutors believe the
mosaic was taken from the museum before the fire, because it shows no sign of
damage like the other fragments.
The mystery of the mosaic’s
whereabouts did not begin to clear until 2013, when an Italian expert on
ancient marbles, Dario Del Bufalo, published a monograph about the Roman’s
emperor’s use of red porphyry, a blood-colored stone associated with power. To
promote his book, Mr. Del Bufalo gave a talk in New York attended by many art
historians and dealers. He said he showed the assembled experts a photo of the
mosaic that had been taken at a gallery in Rome in the 1960s, a rare sighting
of the stolen work.
Ms. Fioratti and her husband had
never tried to hide the mosaic, and there were people in the audience who had
seen it in their home, Mr. Del Bufalo said in an interview. Reports of its
whereabouts in New York eventually reached the ears of the authorities, he
said.
It is unclear why it took four
years for the investigation to be completed. Earlier this year, Matthew
Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney who has spearheaded Mr. Vance’s
efforts to recover stolen antiquities, contacted Mr. Del Bufalo to gather evidence.
A judge issued a search warrant to seize the piece on Sept. 18.
Mr. Del Bufalo said it matters
little who sold the mosaic to Mr. Fioratti, who was a longtime correspondent
for Il Tempo newspaper, because he or she could not have passed along good
title to a stolen item.
For her part, Ms. Fioratti said
she had no papers proving ownership and she could not remember what her husband
had paid for the mosaic. She said he had learned about the piece from a friend,
who told him the aristocratic family was looking for a buyer.
When the piece arrived at their
Park Avenue home, they paid to have a marble frame attached to the square of
flooring and then put it on a pedestal in their living room. Over the years,
Ms. Fioratti said, curators who visited had told her they were interested in
procuring it for their collections. “I could have made a fortune,” she said.”
References
McKinley, J. C. Jr. (2017) A Remnant From Caligula’s Ship,
Once a Coffee Table, Heads Home. New York Times. At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/design/a-remnant-from-caligulas-ship-once-a-coffee-table-heads-home.html
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