A Marble Statue of a Boy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Tsirogiannis, C.(2013), ‘A Marble Statue of a Boy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’, The Journal of Art Crime 9: 55-60.

Since 2006, about 200 antiquities of exceptional quality, depicted in the confiscated Medici, Becchina and Symes-Michaelides archives, have been identified by the Italian authorities as looted and have been repatriated from North American museums, private collectors, antiquities dealers, galleries and auction houses. Most of these antiquities have been already published and exhibited with acknowledgement of their looted past. While details of the acquisitions regarding these looted antiquities were first being published, demonstrating that many of these objects had been sold with fabricated collecting histories (e.g. the famous Euphronios krater at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, now in Rome), new cases started to emerge. This article attempts to trace the true journey of another antiquity, reveals new evidence regarding its collecting history, researches the implications arising and exposes, once again, the way the international illicit antiquities network has been operating in recent years.