Onesimos Kylix

Onesimos Kylix

This kylix (cup) was created by two of Greece's most famous artists, Onesimos and Euphronios, and exported to Etruria (modern Tuscany) in ancient times. It depicts the sack of Troy and was dedicated to the Greek hero Herakles.

Fragments of the vase surfaced over several years on the antiquities market, and were acquired and re-assembled over several years by the J. Paul Getty Museum, which celebrated it as a masterpiece of the museum's antiquities collection.

In the 1983, the Getty purchased fragments totaling some 40% of the kylix from Frieda Tchacos at Galerie Nefer in Zurich, for USD $180,000. Tchacos claimed to have procured the pieces from various sources, including the dealer Nino Savoca; the "Schweitzer collection of Arlesheim" (likely a false provenance); and the Hydra Gallery in Geneva (now understood to have been a front for Italian trafficker Giacomo Medici).

In 1984, Dietrich von Bothmer, the curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contributed yet another a piece, which he said he had acquired from New York dealer Robert Hecht in 1968.

In a 1991 publication, Dyfri Williams, a curator at the British Museum, stated that he had seen a photograph of a another fragment of the object. A photograph of this missing piece was discovered by the Carabinieri while searching Medici’s warehouse in Geneva in 1995. Medici also possessed photographs of the fragments that the Getty had acquired from other dealers.

The distribution of these vase fragments across a broad swath of dealers over several years was later recognized by Italian authorities as a marketing tactic for selling important objects that had been illegally excavated. Rather the sell the fragments as a group, traffickers distributed them across several dealers, who sold them individually with little public attention. Each successive piece of the puzzle increased the value of the vase – and therefore the price that could be charged for the fragments.

True confirmed the theory in an interview with Italian prosecutors, saying she had concluded that dealers were working together to extract higher and higher prices for matching fragments.

The fragments she was being sold had sharp edges that fit neatly with other fragments being sold, not the worn edges one would expect from an ancient fracture.

“I came to realize we were being blackmailed,” she said. “Clearly the pieces seemed to be smashed.... It was clear these fragments had been dispersed over a huge market.”

Italian archaeologist Daniella Rizzo demonstrated at the 1997 Viterbo University conference, “Antichità Senza Provenienza” (Antiques without Provenance) that the kylix had been illegally excavated from the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, where the Met's famous Eupronios krater had been looted. Two additional fragments of the kylix had been found in the San Antonio section of the necropolis there, confirming the connection.

The Getty returned the kylix to Italy in 1999 after receiving further evidence from Italian authorities.

1

Vessel

Greek

J. Paul Getty Museum

83.AE.362

Italy

Gill, D. W. J. 2012. "Context matters: Fragmented pots, attributions and the role of the academic." Journal of Art Crime 8: 79-84.

Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Volume 5 (Occasional Papers in Antiquities, 7; Malibu: J.P. Getty Museum).

Williams, Dyfri (1991), ‘Onesimos and the Getty Iliupersis’, in Marion True (ed.),

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