Christie's is auctioning off antiquities from the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf (christies.com/SaleLanding/in…). Here are some of the more "...you bought that?" lots, starting with...this.
We are informed that this is a Roman bronze panther. Funny, I would have said a camel with constipation of unprovable origin but maybe that's just me. christies.com/lotfinder/anci…
Here's a supposed Roman table leg, "based on" Lysippus' sculpture of Silenus cradling the infant Bacchus, preserved in a Roman marble copy in the Louvre. christies.com/lotfinder/anci…
Sure, this is the same as that. No difference. They're both unholy middle-aged babies about to have their faces gnawed off.
Someone please buy this supposedly Roman horse so we can take it out behind the barn and put it out of its misery. He'll never run another race again with that leg, Timmy. christies.com/lotfinder/anci…
Art student: "I'm so crap at carving faces."
Teacher: "Humm."
Student: "And hands? Forget it!"
Teacher: "Have you considered a career in antiquities forgery?"
Christie's has finally re-posted the lots in their current antiquities sales, so let's take a little look at which ones lack a pre-1970 provenance, shall we?
1985: onlineonly.christies.com/s/ancient-art-… (good think there's absolutely no way that this is a piece of 19th century bric-a-brac! nope, just not possible.)
Wow. Apologies for this thread getting so long. I started tweeting as I was going, but then it turned out that 38 of the 61 lots lack a pre-1970 provenance. Just... wow. I'm going to end with a couple more objects that have ok provenance, but are... special.
Is it a thing to have colored shadows/contouring on Roman mosaics for nipples/breasts? Asking for my job. God, I love my job. onlineonly.christies.com/s/ancient-art-…
Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles.
The Art Institute of Chicago knows about this photograph from 1970 of its Buddha sculpture embedded in the wall of a shrine in Nepal. It knows Nepal prohibited the export of such antiquities in 1956. And yet it's still working on whether to repatriate it...
The Art Institute currently holds at least four Nepali artifacts for which there are photographs or other evidence of theft - all donated by a single collecting couple, the Alsdorfs, who previously had to return nine other stolen artworks.
Even I didn’t think it was this bad: “Reporters reviewed the [Metropolitan Museum’s] catalog and found at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes; 309 of them are on display.” nepalitimes.com/here-now/in-se…
“A look at the museum’s catalogue of more than 250 Nepali and Kashmiri antiquities, for example, found that only three have any origin records explaining how they left the regions.” 😳