Calls to open looted-art archives grow louder

The immature game played by Italy and their Carabinieri cultural patrimony unit against United States Museums and private collectors should now stop&nbsp (Melania Gerlis, "Calls to open looted-art archives grow louder")

It is now 20 years since a trove of Polaroids, documents and antiquities that passed through the hands of the convicted dealer Giacomo Medici were discovered in a Geneva Freeport, seized by the Italian police and presented as evidence in a high-profile looting case in Italy. Six years later, in 2001, the more detailed archives of another convicted antiquities dealer, Gianfranco Becchina, were retrieved by the Swiss authorities and then transferred to Italy. This led to a number of court cases surrounding illegally-excavated antiquities and resulted in some convictions [...]. They have also embroiled Medici and Becchina’s suppliers and buyers—notoriously including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles—with the Becchina archive’s contents leading to police investigations of 10,000 people’s affairs in Italy alone. Only a small portion of the looted works that feature in the Medici and Becchina pictures have been identified, and the raids have had a profound effect on the trade in antiquities. Some items have been repatriated [...] However, museums, auction houses, dealers and most other intermediaries are still in the dark about the tens of thousands of likely illicitly-plundered items included in these, and related, archives, the contents of which are known only to a few.