Reposted from The New York Times
The British Museum recovered more than 350 ancient artifacts that were looted from its storerooms and is putting some on show.
For six months, a team at the British Museum has been working with police to recover hundreds of engraved gems and other items of jewelry that museum officials say a former curator stole from its store rooms. The team has also been planning an exhibition. “Rediscovering Gems,” occupying a room by the British Museum’s grand entrance through June 2, includes dozens of the tiny artifacts known as cameos and intaglios — 10 of which are recovered items. Art dealers who bought the stolen items — some of which date back to ancient Rome — have so far returned 357 treasures to the museum, said Aurélia Masson-Berghoff, a curator who is leading the recovery team. Although over 1,000 items are still missing, and could take years to locate, Masson-Berghoff said her team was hopeful that those could be recovered, too. The new exhibition was part of the museum’s efforts to be transparent about the thefts and its efforts to retrieve the items, she added. During a recent tour of the show, Claudia Wagner, the museum’s senior research associate for gems, said that the jewels had long been underappreciated. The tiny artifacts — often less than a half-inch tall — are hard to discern in natural light, making them easy to ignore, she added. In the exhibition hall, small torches are provided so that visitors can see them properly. Some of the museum’s previous Greek and Roman curators had preferred to focus on bigger and more renowned artifacts like statues and vases, Wagner said, which could explain why many of the cameos and intaglios were uncatalogued before the thefts. On the tour of the show, Wagner and Masson-Berghoff discussed the origins of these precious gems, their uses in ancient times and how they once entranced Europe’s art connoisseurs.
These are edited extracts of that conversation. WAGNER The first engraved gems were what’s called intaglios — where the design is carved into the gem or glass. They were used as seals, so people would push them into wet clay — the equivalent of writing your signature. They were invented in Mesopotamia, but it’s the ancient Greeks who make them into their own art form, and because the Greeks were so interested in mythology, you immediately have all the gods represented. If you look very, very closely at this tiny little figure, he has an ivy wreath in his hair. That’s because this is Bacchus, the god of wine.
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