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Italy demands Louvre return ‘looted’ antiquities

Italy has demanded the return of seven antiquities which it believes were looted before being sold by dealers to the Louvre in Paris in the 1980s and 90s, the museum said on Friday.

Published: 14 July 2023 16:13 CEST

Louvre, Paris

Visitors queue in front of the Pyramid to enter the Louvre Museum in Paris. Photo by AFP

The claim, first reported in France’s Le Monde newspaper, was made in a letter handed over by Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano in February during a visit to France, a spokesperson for the museum said.

All seven items, which include an amphora as well as ancient Greek vases ranging from the 4th to the 6th century BC, were sold by Italian traders convicted or suspected of trafficking in ancient artworks.

“I consider that works of doubtful provenance are a stain on the collections of the Louvre,” the museum’s president, Laurence des Cars, told Le Monde.

“We should acknowledge and examine that with rigour and lucidity,” he added.

READ ALSO: New York returns millions worth of stolen art to Italy

An investigation has been launched into the disputed pieces which could lead to their return towards the end of the year.

The Louvre, which is run by the French state, is the world’s most visited museum and is home to some of Western civilisation’s most celebrated cultural heritage.

A former director of the museum in Paris was charged last year with conspiring to hide the origin of archaeological treasures that investigators suspect were smuggled out of Egypt in the chaos of the Arab Spring.

Jean-Luc Martinez, who ran the Paris Louvre from 2013 to 2021, is accused of turning a blind eye to fake certificates of origin for the pieces, a fraud thought to involve several other art experts.

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Notre Dame’s dead poet mystery close to solution

The exact whereabouts of the tomb of Joachim de Bellay, a French Renaissance poet, has puzzled researchers for many years.

De Bellay, a member of a literary group known as La Pleiade, died aged 37 in 1560.

His family asked for him to be buried in Notre Dame’s Saint-Crepin chapel. But when the site was renovated in 1758, no trace of his remains were found.

His remains’ precise location was shrouded in mystery until 2022 when archaeologists, sifting through the site in the aftermath of the 2019 fire that destroyed much of Notre Dame, found two tombs at the cathedral’s crossing.

READ ALSO Tickets and dates: All you need to know about Notre-Dame reopening

The scientists, working for the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, rapidly identified one of them as that of Antoine de La Porte, a cleric who died in the early 1700s.

But they could not immediately figure out who was buried in the other one.

Using modern methods of analysis, the researchers began to find clues as to his possibly identity. All pointed to de Bellay.

A deformation of his iliac bone told them that he did a lot of horse-riding.

De Bellay “was a skilled rider, he went from Paris to Rome on horseback,” Eric Cubrezy, a doctor and archaeologist, said.

In addition, an incision made by a saw in the corpse’s skull, as well as a broken sternum, suggested the body had undergone an autopsy before being embalmed just like de Bellay.

The final, and most telling, clue was traces of a rare illness, a bone tuberculosis leading to chronic meningitis, consistent with the poet’s medical history.

French daily Le Monde, describing the mystery around the missing corpse as ‘a cold case’, said the latest find was the ‘most spectacular result’ of the Notre Dame digs launched after the 2019 catastrophic fire.

The archaeologists themselves preferred to remain cautious.

“There are still some doubts,” said Christophe Besnier, one of the scientists in charge of the excavation site.

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