Looted antiquities to stay on display at Australian National University

The classic black-figure amphora dating back to 530 BCE had been a key object in the ANU Classics Museum for almost 40 years.

But it, along with two other pieces under investigation, a fish plate and a mysterious marble head from the Vatican, will be able to stay on display under a loan agreement with Italy.

The university bought the two-handled vase in 1984 from Sotheby's in London in honour of the founder of classics at ANU, Richard St Clair Johnson.

But the specialist art squad of Italy's military police force, the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, recently linked the amphora to the activities of an infamous dealer active in the Italian illegal antiquities trade in the 1970s and 80s.

Curator of the ANU Classic Museum Georgia Pike-Rowney said the Carabinieri had been able to identify the vase using its vast database and an AI-driven Stolen Works of Art Detection System.

Through these, they had been able to match the ANU-held vase with one in a polaroid photo that had been part of an earlier criminal investigation, proving it was illegally excavated and sold.

The university made its archives available to the Carabinieri as soon as the vase was brought to its attention, revealing a second problematic object, an Apulian red-figure fish plate dating back to the late 4th century BCE.

The ANU bought the plate in 1984 from a US dealership run by David Holland-Swingler, a key player in the 1980s and 90s antiquities trade.

"During trips to Italy, Swingler sourced material directly from tombaroli - literally 'tomb robbers' who undertake illegal excavations - then smuggled the items to the US hidden among bundles of pasta and other foods," Dr Pike-Rowney said.

It will also remain on display for the next four to eight years as part of the loan agreement with the Italian government.

A third item, a marble portrait head owned by the Vatican, is the most confounding; the museum brought it to the Carabinieri's attention itself during the investigations.

"The Vatican had a collection displayed in the Lateran Palace, which is owned by the Vatican, but it's actually in the city of Rome. And that museum shut in 1970. We purchased ours in 1968," she says.

"So how a piece from a Vatican collection on display in Rome made its way to an Australian university in 1968 via Sotheby's in London I have no idea."

The piece is now subject to a separate inquiry, but remains on display.

Dr Pike-Rowney said the process had been welcomed by the museum as an important learning experience.

"I think as new evidence comes to light, as new technology emerges, we'll constantly be learning new things about the objects in our care," she said.

"Hopefully, by the end of the next few years, where I think a lot of this is going to continue to happen, we'll get to a point where we're actually sure where everything's come from, that everything is owned by the right people."

She said it had also been an opportunity to interrogate local collecting practices, and make them part of teaching classics.

"It's fascinating stuff for students, they're really interested in dealing with these issues," she said.

"And it's such a concrete example of some of these troublesome collecting practices that are really recent.

"This is not problematic collecting in the 1800s. This is 1980s, so it makes it really contemporary."

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She said the revelations had also been a chance to interrogate its acquisition policies and practices more broadly.

"It's not for us to say what the Italians or the Greeks or the Cypriots should feel about their own cultural heritage, that's not our job to tell them how they should feel, or the fact that they should want it all back," she said.

"It's actually for them to advise us what they'd like. So we agreed to an unconditional, voluntary repatriation of these objects. And it was the Italians who came to us and said, 'Would you like to have a couple of them on loan', and we're very gratefully accepting that. However, if they wanted them returned, we'd absolutely be okay with that too."