Nice series of articles in the Plain Dealer:

• A new era for ancient works: Cleveland Museum of Art’s renovated 1916 galleries open June 26 (Intro; nice photo)
• An epic adventure through time: New 1916 galleries at Cleveland Museum of Art open Saturday (General overview; slideshow)
• Cleveland Museum of Art’s new galleries include antiquities on loan from Italy (self explanatory)
• Special events set to celebrate new galleries at Cleveland Museum of Art | cleveland.com (ditto)
• Cleveland Museum of Art’s Apollo sculpture is a star with intriguing past | cleveland.com (nice feature on the Apollo Sauroktonos)

In regards to the last one, we’ve mentioned the controversy about the attribution of the piece to Praxiteles and problems of provenance before. Just to have the ‘rest of the story’ (to date) on record, here’s the concluding bit of the Plain Dealer piece:

[…]

The firmer attribution to Praxiteles signals that Bennett is moving on from the controversy that has dogged the sculpture since the museum acquired it from Phoenix Ancient Art, a dealership with offices in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.
Chief among the questions about the Apollo is the absence of evidence to eliminate concerns that it might have been looted in recent decades in violation of international agreements.
The museum said that a retired German lawyer, Ernst-Ulrich Walter, had reported that he found the sculpture lying in pieces in a building on a family estate he reclaimed after the fall of East Germany. Walter also reportedly remembered seeing the piece on the family estate in the 1930s, although no photographs of it exist from that time.
According to the museum, Walter said he sold the piece to a Dutch art dealer in 1994 but couldn’t remember the dealer’s name. The Dutch dealer then reportedly sold the work to at least one other anonymous collector, who then sold it to Phoenix.
Archaeologists have said that the story, which isn’t backed up by anything other than the lawyer’s word, sends a message to the antiquities market that museums are willing to acquire works with gaps in their ownership histories. This, in turn, encourages looting.
Yet another report, that the sculpture was fished out of the sea between Greece and Italy, was circulated by Agence France-Presse in 2007, though the unnamed Greek officials who made the claim have never presented any evidence or contacted the museum.
Bennett points to scientific tests that indicate the sculpture has been out of the ground for approximately a century, placing it well out of the reach of contemporary laws aimed against looting.
“This is a settled issue,” Bennett said. “We’ve known for a long time that the statue has been outside its archaeological context for at least 100 years.”
Labeling makes a telling reference
The museum always has asserted that the Apollo was probably Greek and probably by Praxiteles, but it allowed the possibility that it might have been produced as recently as A.D. 300, which would make it a less valuable Roman copy.
A new label installed with the work removes any suggestion of Roman origins and pushes the sculpture’s creation back to a window from 350 to 275 B.C., giving it approximately a 20-year overlap with the lifetime of Praxiteles.
Bennett’s attribution stemmed originally from the writings of Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian and philosopher, who described having seen a bronze sculpture matching the description of the Cleveland Apollo in the first century.
Tests performed on samples of metal removed from the sculpture in 2004 proved that the work was made in ancient Greek or Roman times. A half-dozen scholars who examined it before the museum purchased it were also sure it was ancient and not a forgery. But they weren’t certain it was a Praxiteles.
Bennett’s higher degree of certainty comes from having lived with the work for six years, and from having compared it with other ancient versions of the same motif at the Vatican in Rome, the Louvre in Paris and the Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
Slight changes in details such as the wavy pattern in Apollo’s hair, the position of his fingers or the crease on the outer edge of his right foot have convinced Bennett that the Cleveland version is the one on which the others were based.
Apart from the details, Bennett said that the overall impression conveyed by the piece, in comparison with the stiffness and heaviness of the other versions, which are carved in marble, is that it’s the real deal.
“There’s a buoyancy, there’s a lightness to it,” he said of Cleveland’s bronze. “It’s not heavy. It looks like it can almost elevate.”
In addition to the comparisons, Bennett and other staff members at the museum used medical devices to peer inside the sculpture’s cavities and take photographs. The images show, they say, that the sculpture was never exposed to the sea. There are no signs of marine life or corrosion.
Bennett hasn’t published his findings yet. Nevertheless, at least one prominent expert in ancient Greek sculpture is prepared to accept his conclusions.
“From photographs I’ve seen, it does seem quite possible it’s Greek,” said Malcolm Bell III, an art history professor at the University of Virginia and an expert in ancient classical art, who has led an excavation at Morgantina in Sicily.
Part of the sensation over the work is that only about 30 large ancient Greek bronzes have survived antiquity. The rest were melted down to make everything from other sculptures or weapons to nails.
If Bennett is correct, the Apollo would fall into a truly rarefied category. It would be the world’s only original Praxiteles, and the only large ancient Greek bronze attributed to a specific artist by an ancient writer.
Questions persist on provenance
Much as the museum would like to focus the conversation on Praxiteles, however, questions persist about the sculpture’s provenance, or ownership history. That is in part, scholars say, because of the dealers involved and in part because the museum hasn’t shared all the information it has collected about the work.
The museum doesn’t reveal prices in private sales, but a source close to the museum said in 2004 it paid $5 million. The principals of Phoenix Ancient Art, brothers Ali and Hicham Aboutaam, have both had brushes with authorities.
Ali Aboutaam was convicted in Egypt in absentia in 2003 on charges of smuggling and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty in New York in 2004 to a misdemeanor federal charge that he had falsified a customs document.
Before the museum bought the Apollo, museum officials obtained a written statement from the German lawyer, in addition to the reports and written statements from the scholars it consulted. . But the museum has declined to release those items as well as the data from metallurgical tests performed at Oxford University.
Those tests showed that while the sculpture is indeed ancient in origin, the base to which it was attached is about 100 to 500 years old, the museum said.
However, in 2007, the museum did release a critical piece of information — an analysis of the lead solder used to join the Apollo sculpture to its base.
That exploration, performed at the University of Tubingen in Germany, showed that production of the solder “must have occurred less than about [a] hundred years ago.”
Bennett said the report means that the sculpture was joined to its base around 100 years ago, thus proving it was excavated well before modern laws aimed at the prevention of looting.
Still, the fallout over the Apollo continues. In 2007, under political pressure from Greece, the Louvre declined to exhibit the sculpture in a large exhibition on the influence of Praxiteles, preventing scholars from making side-by-side comparisons with other versions of the Apollo Sauroktonos.
Last year, the museum agreed to return 13 antiquities and a Renaissance-era artwork to Italy after the country showed they had been looted, stolen or handled by traffickers.
The museum also agreed to form a joint committee with Italy to examine scientific and technical evidence about the Apollo and a bronze, Roman-era chariot ornament depicting Nike, the goddess of victory. Italy has made no claim and presented no evidence about either piece, Bennett said.
While the committee pursues its work, the museum won’t release any more information about the Apollo, said Bennett and Griffith Mann, the museum’s chief curator.
An international symposium on the work, which the museum originally planned in 2006, has been postponed indefinitely.
Deborah Gribbon, the museum’s interim director, said she is convinced the museum has revealed all pertinent information.
“The issue is not that there are things to hide, it’s that some of this is ongoing research and other elements are proprietary information,” she said.
But Patricia Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago and a leading expert on looting of antiquities, doesn’t support the museum’s position.
“It’s a public institution supported by the taxpayers and the government,” she said. “I think they should come forward with the evidence they have. I don’t know who they’re protecting by secrecy.”

Our previous coverage:

• Praxiteles (?) in Cleveland (Jun4 2004 … when the CMOA acquired it)
• The Antiquities Trade (Aug. 2006)
• Cleveland Apollo Update (Feb. 2007)
• Cleveland MOA Update (Apr. 2007)
• Cleveland Museum of Art Returns (Apr 2009 … mentioned in passing)

… there are probably a few more that I’ve missed …

Souren Melikian writes in the New York Times on the unbelievable prices reached by a couple of antiquities with interesting stories at Sotheby’s latest (including that Serpents and Satyrs piece we pondered for a while):

• via When Roman Statues Play Pranks – NYTimes.com.

A press release from Cyprus’ Press and Information Office:

The Ministry of Communications and Works (Department of Antiquities) announces the completion of the twentieth excavation season of the Department of Antiquities’ systematic excavations at the site of ancient Idalion. Excavations at the site began in 1991 and continue until today under the direction of the Director of the Department of Antiquities Dr. Maria Hadjicosti who is assisted by Senior Technicians S. Lagos and K. Kapitanis. Five young archaeologists from Greek Universities and the University of Cyprus also took part in the excavation this year.

Throughout the twenty-year investigations a total area of two thousand square meters has been investigated on the foothills of Ampileri hill, which was the west acropolis of ancient Idalion.

In this area, a large-scale fortified building complex has been excavated, which could be interpreted as the Palace of ancient Idalion or its Administrative Center. This building complex contains a triple olive-press (unique in its kind throughout the eastern Mediterranean), roads that lead to the complexes’ courtyards from the external gate, towers and impressive storage buildings, houses and military installations.

The Idalion fort is considered to be the largest palace or administrative center identified so far in Cyprus. It is strictly defensive in character with interior towers that control the interior streets and the large rectangular courtyards. Wings with two-storey rooms surrounded the courtyards. The ground floor rooms had storage areas were large storage vessels (pithoi) were kept for the storage of wine and olive oil, the area’s main products. Inscriptions that record tax collecting in kind from the ancient city’s inhabitants have been found in many of these storage rooms.

The abovementioned inscriptions (more than three hundred have so far been found) are part of the Phoenician Archive and indicate the methods used for the collection of taxes by the Phoenicians, who governed the ancient city of Idalion for 150 years, from the middle of the 5th century until the end of the 4th century B.C. The inscriptions are written in ink on marble slabs and pottery sherds.

During this year’s excavations, the investigations extended higher up the hill, where two new building complexes were discovered. These complexes are attached to the eastern and western side of a large interior tower. The complex situated to the east of the tower constitutes the south wing of the storage rooms’ large courtyard. The rooms’ walls survive to a maximum height of three meters. Inside the rooms, pithoi were found as well as other large vessels, inscriptions and pieces of a bronze shield along with other metal weapons that had fallen from the second floor when it collapsed. The second building complex was found to the west of the large tower and it is also comprised of six rooms which are linked up to each other and that also communicate with the two large roads to the north and the west. The complex may have been used by the soldiers who guarded the tower.

With the completion of this year’s investigations, the archaeological site has extended to such an extent that it is now ready to be open to the public. The necessary plans are being prepared in cooperation with the Municipality of Idalion. The archaeological site will thus be joined with the Local Museum of ancient Idalion, which opened to the public in 2008. The footpath that links the museum to the site as well as the parking space near the museum have both been completed. All the above works were realized in close cooperation with the Municipality of Idalion, which has performed exemplary work as far as the promotion of the area’s cultural heritage is concerned.

• via Press and Information Office – Press Releases.

More coverage:

• Cyprus – The excavations of the Department of Antiquities at ancient Idalion, 2010 | Isria
• Diggers discover Phoenician army complex in Cyprus | Reuters

A few days ago it was Berkeley, now it’s Jersey … still not in North America, though. Brief item from the BBC:

Excavations were made at Grouville Church as part of work to extend the building, when archaeologists were called in to monitor the work.

The Reverend Mike Lange-Smith, rector of the church, said a post hole of a Roman period building was uncovered with pottery remains.

He said the finds had been sent to England for dating.

Mr Lange-Smith said the discoveries change the understanding of the church’s history as the earliest known record of the church building had been 1035 AD.

The excavations have now been covered up so work on the new vestry can continue.

• via Roman dwelling find at Jersey church ‘a first’ | BBC.

The Wikipedia article on Jersey suggests that scattered Roman bits have been found previously, but no evidence of a permanent settlement …