(soft piano music)
- [Man] When I was in high school
one of my favorite objects to visit
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
was a Greek vase by an artist whose name is Euphronios.
- [Woman] This vase is decorated by Euphronios
with the scene from the Trojan war.
Sarpedon, a son of Zeus has died in the battle field
and one thing that the Greeks were afraid of
if they died on the battle field
it was that their bodies would be neglected.
So Zeus has sent two messengers
the wing deitys Sleep and Death
to take Sarpedon on back home.
- [Man] They're lifting him up so that his torso
is exposed to us so that we can see
the beautiful delicate work in that abdomen.
- [Woman] And the Greeks thought that actually the best time
to die was when you are young and beautiful.
You'd never have to know the indignities of growing old.
- [Man] And the painters expressed that
not only for the beauty of the human body
the definition of the musculature
but also in a particularly signal Greek way
representing the face as serene even in the face of death
and imperfect profile.
- [Woman] And you can tell Euphronios
must have been very proud of this face
because he signed it right across the top
on one side of the head of Hermes the messenger god
who is guiding Sarpedon soul Euphronios painted me.
- [Man] Like the pot is speaking.
- [Woman] And the viewers of this pot
would have read these texts out loud.
There is no such thing
as reading out loud in the ancient world.
So you can imagine them drinking wine
talking about Hypnose and Thanatose and Euphronios.
- [Man] This pot is in exceptionally good condition
and that's especially clear in the decorative banding
that surrounds the major frieze where we see the figures.
There are these beautiful palmettes
where the drawing remains wonderfully sharp.
- [Woman] Which is even more incredible when you consider
that Euphronios would have painted
this very quickly before the pot dried too much.
- [Man] And we can see the individual lines
would have been laid down with a syringe
to make a bead of color and we're seeing it
in a state that is not very different
from the way it would have been seen
when it was first made about 2500 years ago.
Which is why this pot was so sort after
when it came on into the market.
- [Woman] In 1972 the Metropolitan museum of Art
paid a million dollars for this vase.
- [Woman] The director of the Metropolitan
said that this vase was so important
it would rewrite art history.
- [Woman] He thought the drawing was the quality
of a Picasso of a Leonardo de Vinci.
- [Man] Its is a stella example
of attic red figure vase painting
a style that we believe this artist introduced.
And it allowed for the detailed representation
of the human body that was so important to the Greeks
as they moved towards the classical period.
- [Woman] And the reason it's so well preserved
is it spent those 2500 years in a tomb
in the Italian town of Cerveteri.
It was purchased by the ancient Etruscans and buried--
- [Man] So the pot was made near Athens and was exported.
Bought by an Etruscan that is the culture
that existed just before Rome and was buried in a tomb.
The Etruscans are known for their elaborate burials.
- [Woman] Which preserve things like this for us
but which provide a very tempting target for tomb robbers
who try and find things in Etruscan tombs
to sell on the art market.
And that's exactly what happened in the early 1970s.
- [Man] When a thief identifies a tomb and begins to dig
they're looking for the most valuable treasures
which means that they're willing to destroy
everything else that they find along the way.
Tomb robbery does a reparable harm
not only to objects but to archeological evidence.
- [Woman] For example we don't know
whether the owner of the tomb ever used this vase or not.
Because by the time it got
to Metropolitan Museum it had been cleaned
and out back together.
If archeologists excavate the tomb the can see the residues
on the inside of pottery to see whether
they held a last funerary meal.
- [Man] And that knowledge is lost permanently
it will never be recovered.
This incredibly important vase
could have been even more valuable.
- [Woman] By analyzing residues in pottery found in tombs
we can do things like track ecological conditions.
See what climate change has been like from
2500 years ago to the present.
- [Man] So how did the pot make its way
from a previously unknown tomb
to the Greek and Roman galleries
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and then back to Italy where it is now.
- [Woman] It all started with a car crash.
Police went investigating fan that the glove box was stuffed
full of photographs of dirty broken antiquities
and after doing a lot of investigating
they eventually found he was part of a smuggling ring
that was headed by a figure named Giacomo Medici
who had a warehouse in Switzerland
filled full of antiquities and filled full of records.
Records of this vase being sold to a dealer
who sold it the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- [Man] This vase actually changed more than art history.
It changed the way that we understand
these elaborate networks of elicit trade.
- [Woman] Prior to the purchase of this vase
there've been plenty of looted antiquities
bought by American Museums but nobody really cared.
The museums knew that they're probably looted
but this vase caused so much publicity.
It was so beautiful people wanted to know more about it.
And then they were horrified
at the thought that this ancient culture
was being destroyed in order to produce
a few master works like this in American Museums.
- [Man] The Museum should have known better.
But they were offered a cover story
that offered just enough plausible deniability
that it allowed the museum to turn a blind eye.
Which was at this historical moment not so uncommon.
- [Woman] True, the story they got was that
this vase had been owned by a Lebanese art collector
and that his grandfather had bought it
in London in the early 1990s.
But they really should have asked more questions.
- [Man] So the vase ended up at The Met
on a lovely pedestal in the middle of the Greek galleries
and The Met was rightfully very proud of it.
But our awareness of the damage
that is done by grave robbing
develops in the next couple of decades
and this vase becomes increasingly problematic.
- [Woman] And once the Italians raided
that warehouse in Switzerland there is no longer
any deniability for The Met.
One of the things that the Italian authorities
found in this warehouse was a polaroid of meta chip
proudly pausing next to the Sarpedon vase
in the Metropolitan Museum.
Interestingly the way that international law works
there was no legal right
for the Italians to reclaim this vase.
But the public relations aspect of it was so bad
that The Met in 2006 did return it to Italy.
- [Man] When the vase was repatriated
that is when it was returned to Italy
it went into the Etruscan museum in Rome
with a lot of pomp and ceremony.
This was a great achievement
by the Italian law enforcement agencies.
- [Woman] It was ultimately returned to Cervetari
the town where it was dug up from illegally
so many years ago.
So now instead of millions of people seeing it
thousands of people do.
- [Man] What is our responsibility
now in the modern world?
Where should objects reside?
- [Woman] And another thing that changes
that question is the issue of the technological
reproductions that we can make.
- [Man] And so maybe our technologies
do change the equation.
- [Woman] Of course looking at our reproduction
it's never gonna be as good as looking at the original.
But if we look at our reproductions
we're not increasing the risk of looting.
So I think the sacrifice of looking at reproductions
is worthwhile to make sure
that these sites aren't looted anymore
that we never lose the archeological information
that goes along with the beauty of these ancient images.
(soft piano music)