By RANDY KENNEDY
Dallas Museum of Art
The Dallas Museum of Art
voluntarily returned an ancient marble mosaic in its collection to
Turkey on Monday, after determining that the work — which dates from
A.D. 194 and shows Orpheus taming animals with his lyre — was probably stolen years ago from a Turkish archaeological site.
The
decision, part of a new plan by the museum to court exchange agreements
with foreign institutions more actively, comes at a time when the
Turkish government has become more aggressive in seeking antiquities it
believes were looted from its soil. In recent months it has pressed the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and several other museums around the world to return objects and, to
increase its leverage, it has refused loan requests to some.
The
Met says that the objects sought by Turkey were legally acquired in the
European antiquities market in the 1960s before being donated to the
museum in 1989.
Other museums have
accused Turkey of undue intimidation. Last year the Pergamon Museum in
Berlin returned a 3,000-year-old sphinx, which Turkey said had been
taken to Germany for restoration in 1917. But German officials say
Turkey has continued to deny loans of objects for exhibitions because of
claims to other objects in the Pergamon collection.
The
Dallas mosaic, bought at auction at Christie’s in 1999 for $85,000, is
thought to have once decorated the floor of a Roman building near
Edessa, in what is now the area around the city of Sanliurfa in
southeastern Turkey. Edessa developed alliances with Rome from the time
of Pompey and was sacked under the rule of the emperor Trajan.
Maxwell
L. Anderson, the director of the museum in Dallas, said that when he
took over at the beginning of 2012, he asked antiquities curators to
identify objects that might have provenance problems.
“What
I didn’t want to happen here was a succession of slow-motion claims
coming at us,” he said in an interview. As part of the review, the
museum has also transferred legal ownership of several objects to Italy,
including a pair of Etruscan shields and three kraters, or earthenware
vessels used to mix wine and water.
Turkish
officials had been searching for the Orpheus mosaic for some time, Mr.
Anderson said. “For whatever reason, they hadn’t found their way to the
Christie’s catalog or to us,” he said.
When
the museum contacted Turkey earlier this year to say that it had doubts
about the mosaic, whose existence seems not to have been cited in
publications before its inclusion in the Christie’s catalog, Turkish
officials provided photographs of a looted site near Edessa whose
physical characteristics closely matched those of the mosaic.
“I saw that, and even as a novice, I said: ‘Done,’ ” Mr. Anderson said.
Cemalettin
Aydin, the consul general of Turkey in Houston, who along with other
Turkish officials took possession of the mosaic at a ceremony in Dallas
on Monday morning, said in prepared remarks that he applauded the
museum’s “unwavering ethical stance.” He added that the restitution
would lead to an active loan arrangement between Turkey and the Dallas
museum. The museum has no Anatolian collection to speak of, and so the
hope is that the agreement with Turkey will allow Dallas to organize
ambitious exhibitions of work lent from that region.
The
return of the mosaic is the first official act of the museum’s new
international loan initiative, called DMX, which seeks agreements with
foreign museums to share objects and to collaborate on conservation
projects, exhibitions and educational programs.
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