AFA 22nd Anniversary

2022 Antiques & Fine Art 73 Art history is not a fixed subject. Artworks gain new, sometimes improved, and sometimes downgraded, attributions, while unknown works by important artists are sometimes discovered by researchers. One such work, a circa-1520 painting titled The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus at Eryx and Making Offerings at Anchises’s Grave, was recently attributed to Italian artist Dosso Dossi (1489–1542) and acquired by the National Gallery of Art in the past year (Fig. 13, image on the right). The painting completes the story of the artist’s Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast (also circas1520) (left), which has been part of the museum’s collection since 1939. New acquisitions are fun for institutions to trumpet, but there is an ongoing dark side too, in the growing number of museums required to give up items designated as stolen or looted. The Washington, D.C.-based Museum of the Bible returned five thousand artifacts to the Egyptian government; while The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a religious sculpture from the tenth century to Nepal; the Brooklyn Museum repatriated 1,300 pre-Columbian objects to Costa Rica; the Philadelphia Museum of Art sent back to the Czech Republic a sixteenth-century Italian shield; the Dallas Museum of Art returned a statue of a Hindu deity to Nepal that had disappeared from a temple shrine; the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama returned two works of art to two Alaskan Native American tribes; and the Denver Art Museum restituted four looted artifacts to Cambodia. It wasn’t just institutions that were caught: celebrity Kim Kardashian was forced to give up an ancient Roman sculpture she had purchased from a Belgian gallery in 2016, as it had been looted, and American hedge- fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt surrendered 180 looted and illegally smuggled antiquities valued at $70 million; he was given a lifetime ban on acquiring other relics as part of an agreement with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Daniel Grant is a freelance writer specializing in the arts industry .