Opinion | Who Owns the ‘Victorious Youth’? - The New York Times
Moderator Msn
Who Owns the ‘Victorious Youth’?
GUEST ESSAY
June 30, 2024
Mr. Kuper is an anthropologist and the author, most recently, of “The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.” He wrote from London.
In the summer of 1964, Italian fishermen recovered an antique bronze statue from the seabed off Italy’s Adriatic coast. They landed it in the small port of Fano, where it disappeared for almost a decade; apparently it spent some time in a priest’s bathtub and a cabbage patch. It reappeared in the gallery of a Munich art dealer who dated it to around 400 B.C. and claimed that it was the work of Lysippos, an Athenian sculptor. The Getty Foundation bought it in 1977 for almost $4 million and put it on display as the “Victorious Youth” at the Getty Villa, where it still is.
Though maybe not for much longer. In 2018 Italy’s highest court declared the statue the property of Italy — while conceding that it might have been discovered in international waters and that the sculptor was probably Greek.
Some of the reasoning was technical: The statue had been landed at an Italian port by an Italian-flagged vessel and had remained on Italian soil for several years. Some arguments depended on historical interpretation: When the statue was created, the judge said, “the artist had most probably visited Rome and Taranto.” The judge added, “At the relevant time, Greece and Rome had enjoyed good relations, and thereafter, Roman civilization developed as a continuation of Hellenic civilization.” These considerations were, in the judge’s view, sufficient to establish a “significant connection” with Italy, a state that came into existence in 1861. In May, the European Court of Human Rights upheld Italy’s right to seize the statue.
This is a time of reckoning for museums. There is widespread agreement, even in museums, that questionable pieces in collections should be returned. But returned to whom? If a statue cast in Greece 2,000 years ago is discovered off the coast of Italy, is it part of the heritage of modern Italy? The Italian courts seem to think so. If a statue cast in Rome 2,000 years ago is discovered in Greece, Cyprus or Turkey, would it belong to one of those states, or would Italians have a claim over Roman antiquities on the ground that they share a culture — whatever that may mean — with ancient Romans? Is the modern Italian Republic the heir to the multiethnic Roman Empire, which spanned most of Europe, the Near East and parts of North Africa for more than four centuries?
These are hard questions that may not have satisfactory answers. When an item is hundreds of years old, museums cannot simply hand it back to a person it once belonged to, and it is not usually a straightforward matter to identify the original owners or their descendants. The default response is to send the object to the rulers of the modern nation within whose boundaries it was probably first found. That can lead to incongruities.
Consider a recent case that came out of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Matthew Bogdanos, the assistant district attorney who heads that department’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, presented to the Chinese Consulate in New York 38 miscellaneous East Asian antiquities that his office had confiscated. Among them were what Kate Fitz Gibbon, the executive director of the Committee for Cultural Policy, a U.S. think tank, described to me in an email as “a grab bag” of Tibetan Buddhist objects, some of them “likely copies.”
Should the Chinese authorities have these sacred objects, given China’s contested record in Tibet? When a New York collector donated a remarkable shrine to the Minneapolis Institute of Art in August 2023, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, wrote that he was “very happy to know that some of our sacred images have survived and are being treated with appropriate respect elsewhere.”
Other cases have raised questions about whether museums have a responsibility to ensure that returned items are looked after and displayed. Take the case of the Benin Bronzes, which were looted from Benin City in modern Nigeria by the British in 1897 and are exhibited in museums around the world. In 2022 the Smithsonian announced that it would transfer ownership of 29 of its Benin antiquities to Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments.
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the founder of the nonprofit Restitution Study Group, petitioned a court to halt the transfer, pointing out that Benin had trafficked slaves to European traders in exchange for brass bracelets, some of which had probably been melted down to cast the bronzes. Surely, she argued — unsuccessfully — descendants of African slaves living in the United States have an interest in what happens to these treasures.
Once the bronzes were back in Nigeria, the story took an unexpected turn. For decades the Nigerian government had lobbied for their return, but they have also been claimed as personal property by the present oba, or king, of Benin, Ewuare II. The Nigerian government had announced that its National Commission for Museums and Monuments would handle all negotiations and reassured organizations that wished to repatriate objects that they would deal with a single, authoritative interlocutor representing the public interest. But in March 2023, Muhammadu Buhari, the departing president of Nigeria, proclaimed the oba the outright owner of all Benin antiquities. “We were blindsided,” a commission official told the BBC. Cambridge University paused the planned transfer of 116 Benin artifacts to Nigeria.
Who should own the Benin Bronzes? Should it be the present-day government of Nigeria? Or should the bronzes be the private property of Ewuare, a direct descendant of the slave-trading oba who was overthrown by the British? Or the museums, where they can be viewed by the descendants of those who paid for the materials to make the bronzes with their labor and lives?
The desire to repair historical injustices is honorable. And certainly great museums have questions to answer about some of their prized possessions. But in the rush to undo earlier wrongs, we risk perpetrating fresh injustices.
The Getty has vowed to continue to defend its possession of the statue “in all relevant courts.” It can make a reasonable case. The relics of ancient empires often passed through many hands, traveled long distances and were traded by people speaking a variety of languages. It is misleading to imagine them as emblems of a modern state, once perhaps a province of such an empire. For their part, the great museums have a right — even a duty — to conserve and exhibit antiquities acquired in good faith. But they must also take responsibility for ensuring that artifacts that are returned are in the care of responsible institutions where they will be looked after and displayed. Should they fail in their duty of care, they may be held responsible for cultural vandalism.
Adam Kuper is an anthropologist and the author, most recently, of “The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions.”