Morgantina and Selinunte in Sicily, June 2022

 In June 2022 I was with 16 others in Sicily on a tour I had organized in conjunction with Sicily Tour, an excellent travel company in Siracusa. I had requested that we visit Morgantina, an archeological site not far from the more famous Roman villa of Casale near the town of Piazza Armerina. I didn't expect that we would first visit the small museum in Aidone, near Morgantina, which displays artifacts excavated from the site. After passing an array of huge urns, we came to a gorgeous terracotta head of Hades, which the guide explained had been returned to the museum from the Getty in Los Angeles. The head was illegally excavated in the 1970s, sold by Robyn Symes, a London antiquities dealer (now known to have traded in illegally excavated and exported antiquities) to Maurice Templesmann, who sold it to the Getty in 1985. Proof that it came from Morgantina came when a bit of the blue beard was found in the San Francesco Bisconti section of the Morgantina archeological site. Morgantina was dedicated to the goddess Demeter and Demeter, her daughter Persephone and her daughter's abductor Hades were depicted there in several versions. I believe this label was the first one I have ever seen in a museum that states that the object had been illegally excavated and subsequently acquired by a museum.

Displayed behind the head of Hades is a pair of acroliths, the heads and feet or two goddesses, probably Demeter and Persephone, whose bodies would have been wood that decayed away. These were returned to Morgantina in 2008 from the collection of Maurice Tempelsman, after spending 5 years at the University of Virginia Art Museum. Tempelsman had purchased them for reportedly $1 million in 1980, from Robyn Symes. 

Further on in the museum is a room dedicated to a monumental stone sculpture, the Goddess of Morgantina, which had been called the Getty Aphrodite, but is probably of Demeter, her daughter, or Persephone, or Hera, queen of the gods. Here again the label states, "The statue of a female deity from Morgantina, excavated clandestinely and exported illegally, was repatriated in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum of Malibu..." The label does not address the decades-long attempts by the Italians to retrieve the sculpture from the Getty, a story that is recounted along with substantial information about the practices of museums and the Getty specifically to acquire illegally excavated and exported antiquities, in the book Chasing Aphrodite. The label goes on to describe the sculpture as a "pseudo-acrolith," meaning that it is made of different materials - the body of limestone the head, hands and feet of marble, and the lost hair probably of bronze. 

Wandering farther through the museum, I found a small group of spectacular silver vessels, the Morgantina silver, which the Metropolitan Museum purchased in 1981 or 1982 from Robert Hecht, another dealer who was charged with illegal trafficking in Italy. The Met fought to keep the silver for decades, finally agreeing to return it in 2011. 

It's interesting to note the changes in value as looted items moved through the market. This route of the Morgantina silver is from Lucy Thomas, Morgantina Silver, on the Trafficking Culture website:

“The route was as follows: Vincenzo Bossi and Filippo Baviera, tombaroli in Enna, sold the silver for 110 million lire ($27,000) to Orazio Di Simone, a Sicilian middleman based in Lugano in Switzerland, who sold it for $875,000 to Robert Hecht, who sold the silver to the Metropolitan Museum for $3 million[1].”

A major figure in the fight to retrieve artifacts from Morgantina has been Malcolm Bell, director of the excavations at Morgantina for many years and it was writings by him that inspired me to want to visit Morgantina in the first place. 

These objects are spectacular. They were treasures in the major collections that had acquired them for huge amounts of money. Now they are on view in a small museum with beautifully designed spaces, near the site for which they were created and where they represent the ancient culture of the place. In this home they make more sense to me than they would have in the American museums that held on to them for so long. While thousands more people might pass by them in the Getty or the Met, here they stand out as singular objects and the viewer can feel their connection to their sources. They are worth a pilgrimage.

A few days later, we visited the huge site of Selinunte, with several temple remains and a very large residential and commercial ruin as well. Scattered on the site were triglyphs, fallen from the entablature of the temples. I thought about triglyphs and metopes and wondered about the narrative sculptural reliefs that would have been in the metopes. A couple of days later, in the Archeological Museum in Palermo, I saw some of the metopes, as well as a large selection of other objects from Selinunte, many excavated from nearby burial grounds. 

Triglyphs and metopes from Temple C, Selinunte, ca. 550 BC

Triglyphs and metopes from Temple E, Selinunte, 460-450 BC

Having just been at Selinunte, I could feel where these objects might have been and even have a sense of them as part of the ancient culture of the place. I realized that the Parthenon marble sculptures would have a similar power if they were seen in sunny Athens, near their original home, as opposed to the British Museum, in often cloudy and grey London. In December 2022 I was in London and looked at them there. I believe I would have a better chance of understanding where they were placed and how they functioned if they were closer to their original site.

detail, Temple E metope, depicting Artemis's dogs attacking Actaeon in punishment for having seen Artemis naked. Note that her head, arms and feet are marble and the rest is limestone. 460-450 BC

Doing a bit of research for this essay, I discovered that the metopes from Temple C were excavated in 1823 by two British architects, Samuel Angell and William Harris, who tried to ship them to the British Museum. But with the lesson of the Parthenon, the Italians were able to stop the transport and divert the sculptures to Palermo.