Let the Art Buyer Beware

A ruling handed down Thursday by a federal judge in Indianapolis promises to provide important guidance on how American museums may ethically go about acquiring the antique patrimony of other nations. As such, it will help bring a welcome clarity to this difficult and contentious issue, all the more so because Judge James E. Noland’s decision was based, at least in part, on testimony by curators at leading U.S. museums.

The case involved four important fragments from a 6th Century Byzantine mosaic that once decorated the ceiling of the even older Church of the Panagia Kanakaria in the village of Lythrankomi on the north side of the island of Cyprus. The fragments, which depict an adolescent Jesus, two apostles and an archangel, are among the few examples of early Byzantine art to survive the general destruction of religious images ordered by an 8th Century emperor, who belonged to a movement whose tenets bequeathed to our language the word iconoclast.

The fragments were stolen after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and remained hidden for almost a decade. Then, through intermediaries, they were sold to an Indianapolis art dealer for slightly more than $1 million. That dealer, in turn, used additional intermediaries to offer the mosaics to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $20 million. On learning of the attempted sale, the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus sued to recover its art, charging that the dealer had been insufficiently diligent in attempting to determine the fragments’ actual origin and ownership. Judge Noland agreed, and ordered the mosaics returned to the church.

Among the scholars who testified on the Cypriots’ behalf were Marion True, the Getty’s curator of antiquities, and Gary K. Vikan, curator of medieval art at Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery, which has one of the world’s finest collections of Byzantine art. Both agreed on the importance of Nolan’s ruling. From now on, Vikan said, curators purchasing antiquities will have to ask: “Was the work attached to a building? Was it removed in time or war? The more suspicious the circumstances, the more circumspect the buyer must be.”