Louvre's Apollo: MiBACT should clarify, maybe the work belongs to Italy

It had made headlines last fall with the Louvre’s “Mission Apollo” campaign, a fundraising effort to purchase an important 68-centimeter-tall bronze statuette from the 1st or 2nd century B.C. depicting the god Apollo. The work will cost 6.7 million euros, 3.5 of which will be provided by the Société des Amis du Louvre and 800,000 covered through donations from private individuals raised through the special popular patronage campaign. As early as Feb. 19 (the campaign expired on the 28th) the Louvre had managed to raise the sum of 800 thousand euros with 6,500 donations from private individuals, and on March 5 the Louvre thanked donors for helping the museum purchase the work.

Now, however, doubts are being cast on the campaign: senator Margherita Corrado of the 5-Star Movement, an archaeologist, and the Campania branch of the association Mi Riconosci? are in fact asking the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to shed light on the campaign. The problem lies in the fact that the provenance of the work is unknown, but despite this, the Louvre presents it as being of “Pompeian” origin. The bronze Apollo is recorded in 1922, in France, in the collection of the Durighello family of antiquarians, but before this date we have no information about the sculpture’s provenance. The small bronze, however, is mentioned in the Répertoire de la statuaire grecque et romaine by Salomon Reinach, a 20th-century Hellenist, as coming from the Pompeian area. But we do not know how it reached France.

“There are numerous cases in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of archaeological excavations carried out by private individuals in the Vesuvian area, who would arrange to sell the valuable material to the highest bidder,” explains Marina Minniti, art historian and Pompeian activist for Mi Riconosci. “The most egregious case? The sale of the Boscoreale treasure, now in the Louvre: we are at the end of the 19th century when Vincenzo De Prisco finds the famous pieces of silverware in one of his funds. Soon the treasure ends up in the hands of antiquarians, is bought by a private Frenchman, who in turn donates it to the Louvre.”

“A black-and-white photograph, also published on the cited web page, documents the condition of the statuette before its sale to the ancestors of the current owners, which took place in 1925, and shows it partially covered with concretions because it has not yet been restored,” Margherita Corrado noted in a parliamentary question. “That circumstance, which argues in favor of a recovery that took place a few years earlier, combined with the declared provenance of the work from the surroundings of Pompeii, can only suggest that it was found in excavations illegally conducted in the late 19th-early 20th century in one of the Vesuvian villae.”

To date, Mi Riconosci points out, neither the Louvre nor the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage can prove the work’s provenance. In recent days the case of the Pompeian Apollo purchased by the Louvre has returned to the headlines thanks to the attention of Senator Margherita Corrado and her parliamentary question addressed to MiBACT. But the Ministry explained that it could not prove the Italian provenance and therefore blow up the purchase through legal channels. “So why does the French museum give for certain its provenance from the Vesuvian area, particularly in the fundraising campaign?” the association asks. “The possibilities,” it concludes, “are two: either the Pompeian provenance is certain, and then the MiBACT has a duty to return the artwork to Italy, or it is not certain at all, and then the MiBACT would have a duty to point this out, depriving the Louvre of the possibility of using the Pompeian provenance as an excuse to attract funds and patrons. We are tired of seeing, in the 21st century, Pompeii and the Vesuvian area as exotic buying and selling territory for European and global Museums.”

Margherita Corrado also asks MiBACT for clarity on the matter. Specifically, in the question, she asks to know whether, net of the sculpture’s declared Italian (and more punctually Vesuvian) provenance, the ministry “has requested that it be exhibited or whether it is in any case aware of the existence of an export permit by which the work has legally left our country to enter France”; whether, in the case of the absence of the permit, “it does not believe that the bimillennial presence of the statue of Apollo citaredo in Italy legitimizes our country, far more than the French, to consider the work as patrimony of the nation and to make an active effort, both so that Italian ownership is recognized by the transalpines, and to regain possession of it”; whether he does not perceive “a fund of bad faith in the operation initiated by the Louvre, since France, having ratified the 1970 Paris Unesco convention only almost 30 years later (1997), has been very careful not to apply to the case in point art. 15 of the convention, i.e., the possibility of special agreements between countries for the return of cultural goods illegally exported before 1970”; whether it does not consider “censurable the actions of the Louvre museum, an institution with declared purposes of research, conservation and exhibition, but willing to be guilty of the crime of receiving stolen goods (prescribed) by purchasing an artifact that it knows entered France illegally, albeit a century ago, just as in the 1980s and 1990s it appears to have purchased from a well-known Italian trafficker.” whether he does not consider it “proper to hold the French to account for the inconsistency they have shown, blithely ignoring the consequences of the Apollo citaredo’s known Italian provenance while, precisely by virtue of the aforementioned Art. 15 of the Paris Convention, they returned cultural goods of much higher value, which entered the country well before 1970, to African states such as Egypt whose favor they evidently intended to secure or have forgiven ancient sins.”

Pictured is the Apollo at the center of the affair.

Louvre's Apollo: MiBACT should clarify, maybe the work belongs to Italy

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