[MSN] Nasher Museum acquires ancient treasures.

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Nasher Museum acquires ancient treasures
 

Ellen Sung, Staff Writer 
DURHAM - The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University has received a
monumental gift of ancient Mediterranean art that doubles the size of the
museum's antiquities collection and includes objects nearly 5,000 years old.
The gift from an anonymous donor, to be officially announced today, was
collected from the 1920s to the early 1980s and includes about 220 pieces in
gold, terra cotta, bronze, ceramic, marble and amber.

"It actually complements the older collection," said Duke archaeology
professor Carla Antonaccio. "I'm not telling my students they have to go to
Raleigh now" to study the N.C. Museum of Art's ancient objects.

About 60 antiquities -- including 45 pieces from the gift -- will be on view
in a new exhibit titled "The Past Is Present," opening at the Nasher on Feb.
15. Other objects will be available for students and scholars to study.
Museum officials and classics professors declined to identify the donor but
said the gift came from someone with longtime Duke ties, not an alumnus.

The gift comes amid a roaring controversy about ancient objects looted from
excavation sites and acquired by museums.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Art have returned antiquities to
Italy and Greece under questioning about how the objects were unearthed.
Meanwhile, former Getty antiquities curator Marion True and American art
dealer Robert Hecht are on trial in Rome on charges of trafficking stolen
artifacts. And looting in Iraq has become an urgent concern among
archaeologists.

'Do you have a bill of sale for this?'

Kimerly Rorschach, who became the Nasher's director in 2004, said the museum
has turned down several gifts of antiquities since her arrival because of
incomplete documentation. When the anonymous donor approached the museum in
2005, she assumed the same problem would exist.

"You say, "Well, do you have a bill of sale for this?' " Rorschach said. "To
our delight, we were able to accept."

The Nasher is working on a policy for accepting antiquities, but Rorschach
said she is inclined to turn down gifts that aren't documented before 1970,
when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
adopted a convention to tighten antiquities trade. Both the Getty and the
British Museum have adopted the same standard.

"You don't want to acquire things that are excavated recently," Rorschach
said. "There is a link between the market and clandestine looting of sites.
We don't want to contribute to that in any way. ... Pretty soon, the Iraq
War will be 10 years ago, and we know we won't want to be acquiring work
that was sold at that time."

Malcolm Bell III, a University of Virginia archaeologist and a leading
proponent of stricter museum acquisition policies, lectured Friday at the
Nasher. He and Antonaccio are co-directors of excavations at Morgantina, a
major archaeological site in Sicily that dates back to 1000 B.C.

"It is extraordinarily difficult to excavate areas raided by looters," Bell
said, noting that thieves with metal detectors damage artifacts they think
are worthless and rip objects from their original context. "The art market
erases the history of ownership that museums otherwise work very hard to
protect."

Objects to adore as well as study

At a Friday preview of the gift, Anne Schroder, curator of academic
programs, stood before a Greek Droop cup from the sixth-century B.C. It was
done in the hallmark burnt umber-and-black style known as black figure, and
Schroder pointed out the intricate figures painted underneath horses and
warriors and the detailed patterning toward the stem.

"It sends chills up my spine," Schroder said.

Other highlights of the new collection include an exquisite sculptural gold
disc with four bees and a flower, possibly worn as a pendant in the seventh
century B.C., and an almost perfectly preserved amber dolphin from Southern
Italy.

The exhibit allows stunning visual connections: A Greek white ground
lekythos, or storage vessel, from the fifth century B.C., shows a woman with
a mirror in the background; the same case holds an Etruscan mirror of
near-identical shape.

  

Reach staff writer Ellen Sung at 829-4565 or esung at newsobserver.com.