Italy Defends Treasures (and Laws) With a Show


By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO.
Published: October 7, 2008 - New York Times


ROME — An exhibition celebrating a century-old piece of legislation may
not seem an obvious crowd pleaser. But for the curators, it’s a way of
arguing that Italy’s art treasures would be vastly diminished were it
not for its strict — some assert, draconian — cultural-heritage laws.


That’s why every statue, vase and archaeological shard on display in
“Ruins and the Rebirth of Art in Italy,” a show that opened last week at
the Colosseum in Rome, has a story to tell.


Artworks can be plundered by tomb robbers or invading armies, or
demolished as cities expand. Natural catastrophes like a volcanic
eruption can wipe out entire cities, as Mount Vesuvius’s did to Pompeii
in A.D. 79.


Italy’s response has been a series of laws first codified in 1909 in a
statute declaring that “all manner of things movable or immovable” that
are at least 50 years old and “of historical, archaeological,
paleo-anthropological interest” fall under the government’s protection.


The fruits of that statute are evident in displays like a first-century
statue, the so-called Marching Artemis, which was dug up illegally
around 1994 and then sold to Swiss art traffickers. The traffickers
tried in turn to sell it to Japanese and American collectors when the
looted pieces were identified by Italy’s elite art-theft squad.


To throw the police off their scent, the traffickers had tried to market
an almost perfect mirror image they had commissioned from a
funerary-monument maker in Rome. The police did not fall for the ruse,
and that copy is also on view.


There are earthquake-shattered pieces of Renaissance Virgins and a
blocklike marble head from the seventh or eighth century B.C., one of
5,172 fragments of stone body parts unearthed in Sardinia in 1974.
Experts believe the older figures, reconstructed, could be six or seven
feet high.


“Where do we put them, in which museum?” asked Elena Cagiano, an
archaeologist who is one of the show’s curators. “That’s the sort of
debate that these patrimony laws inspire.”


Also on view is a gigantic second-century marble statue of Dionysus that
was once in the National Roman Museum in Rome, and that was given to
Hitler: by Mussolini in January 1944. It came back to Italy in 1991
after German scholars lobbied for its return. (Italy is still hoping to
retrieve the head of the statue, which is thought to have been illegally
excavated in 1928 along the Appian Way near Castel Gandolfo, transported
to England and donated in 1966 to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.)


The exhibition is part of a broader scholarly program to study and
celebrate the 1909 cultural-heritage legislation, which laid the
groundwork for protective laws adopted in subsequent decades. “That
early law consolidated principles that are still active today,” said
Adriano La Regina, one of Rome’s leading archaeologists and the chief
curator of the exhibition.


In addition to its right to regulate the sale, export or restoration of
any property that is more than 50 years old and has artistic value, the
state has the authority to acquire any such object that is being
privately sold, as long as it pays an equal price. Successive laws have
also enshrined the notion that any artifact dug out of the ground
belongs to the state and not the owner of the land (although the
landowner and the finder are usually entitled to rewards).


Mr. La Regina likes to point out that when it comes to restitution,
Italy abides by its own rules.


Last August the Italian government returned a headless and armless
statue, the so-called Venus of Cyrene, to Libya as part of a $5 billion
compensation accord for damage inflicted by Italy during its colonial
period there. (Italy invaded Libya in 1911 and retained power there
until its troops were driven out by Allied forces during World War II.)


The statue was unearthed by Italian archaeologists in 1913 at the
ancient city of Cyrene and transferred to Rome.


Giving it back “was our duty,” Mr. La Regina said.


“Thank goodness we have these laws,” said Mr. La Regina, who like many
Italian cultural officials frets that more recent cultural-heritage laws
may dilute the original law’s tenets.


Critics say that a 2004 law has made it harder to argue for the artistic
and historical interest of monuments and has diminished the role played
by the Culture Ministry’s expert officials, known as superintendents.


Yet many art and antiques dealers counter that Italy’s cultural
protectionism goes too far.


Domenico Piva, president of the Italian federation of art dealers, said
it was “preposterous” that a release form must be obtained from the
Culture Ministry each time a 50-year-old art object is exported, “even
if it’s an industrial object by an architect.”


He said the laws had “led to the creation of an entirely internal and
provincial art market” and restricted the profile of modern Italian
artists abroad. “We complain that the Impressionists have a great
international market, and our own artists are ignored, but it’s because
our artists only circulate in Italy,” he said.


But Cosimo Ceccuti, the president of a national committee for the
celebration of the conservation laws, said that such arguments miss the
point.


“The first thing to bear in mind is that art is the patrimony of
humanity,” he said. The Italian government’s first priority, he added,
is to ensure that it continues to exist.


"We must make sure that this patrimony will pass down to future
generations," Mr. Ceccuti said.

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