Statue of Sabina

Statue of Sabina

In the 1970s, Nikolas Koutoulakis, the owner of the Paris ancient art gallery Segredakis, enlisted the Italian antiquities trafficker Giacomo Medici to assess this statue of Vibia Sabina, which was stored in a Munich warehouse managed by a Turkish dealer believed to be Fuat Uzumel, who owned the Artemis Gallery. Medici visited the warehouse and took photographs of the statue while it lay on a wooden pallet on the floor covered in dirt.

In 1979, American dealer Robert Hecht acquired the sculpture and facilitated its sale, through his intermediary Fritz Bürki, to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Hecht claimed the sculpture was “said to have been in an aristocratic family collection in Bavaria.”

In 1995, Italian authorities confiscated the photographs taken by Medici in Munich during a raid on his warehouse in Geneva and began matching them to objects in documented collections, eventually locating the Sabina at the Boston Museum of Fine Art.

On September 28, 2006, the Boston MFA and the Italian Ministry of Culture agreed that thirteen antiquities from the collection, including the Statue of Sabina, would be returned to Italy in light of evidence they had been trafficked by the Medici and Hecht network.

1

Sculpture

Roman

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

1979.556

Italy

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/arts/design/29mfa.html

Jason Felch

VG