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Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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The Newest Plot To Rescue Pompeii

Last year, especially last summer, art journalists flocked to write about the latest scandal of conditions at Pompeii, which has been under threat for years and is visited every year by more than 2 million visitors — more than the Uffizi. In August, UNESCO threatened to put the site on its World Heritage in Danger list, which would be highly embarrassing for Italy. Here’s The Art Newspaper‘s report on the situation last August. And here’s an article in The Guardian from last August, reporting that the Italians had called on German assistance, specifically nanotechnology to “focus on one particular apartment building, or insula, at Pompeii and [they] will look to develop long-term solutions and preventative restoration.”

249-co-mb-pompeii-HIGH-01And there’ve been many other articles on “The Great Pompeii Project.”

But on Saturday, two new players — as far as I can tell with web searches — emerged in an article in The Wall Street Journal. The Dynamic Duo Saving Pompeii caught my eye with the mention of Giovanni Nistri, an art-theft specialist and “a police general who helped pry looted Italian antiquities away from top U.S. museums” and “Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, grandson of the last king of Italy—and a winner of Italian TV’s “Dancing with the Stars”—who has been recruited to attract investors.”

Nistri, the WSJ said, will run the project, which involves “restoration efforts, maintenance, a new drainage system and better closed-circuit television surveillance by the end of 2015.” The government reportedly gave him “special administrative powers to make sure the effort is executed on time, on budget, and without attracting the interest of organized crime endemic to the Naples area where the site is located.” From 2007 to 2010, Nistri supervised the carabinieri team that “tracked down millions of euros of art stolen from archaeological excavations. Before that, he was involved in negotiations with the Getty museum for the restoration of plundered antiquities.”

The “42-year-old Prince Emanuele Filiberto, a former hedge-fund analyst at Banque Syz in the mid-1990s” has been enlisted by Pompeii’s mayor to “tap his network of wealthy investors for the city’s plan to build a park north of the site and increase hotel capacity, which is currently just 700 people per night.” The park is intended to discourage “hit-and-run” tourism, instead enticing visitors to stay.

Is this change in the cast of characters a positive development, or just one more detour in the rescue? It is very hard to say from here. The Great Pompeii Project is funded in part by the European Union, so it is not solely dependent on Italian bureaucracy. Let’s hope this is a great step forward.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Art Newspaper

 

More On Damage To Egypt’s Heritage

“…74 precious artifacts [have] been destroyed and…90 were damaged, but repairable…” That is the partial toll of last week’s bombing in Cairo that destroyed much of the Museum of Islamic Art, according to The New York Times, which was late to the story, but made up for it on Friday with Triage for Treasures After a Bomb Blast: Sorting Through the Rubble of Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo.

01MUSEUM-articleLargeThe bombing killed four people and injured 76. Ahmed Sharaf, director of the Antiquities Ministry’s museum division, was quoted saying the damage “could take years” to repair. “We need funds. With financing we can do anything.” The museum owns about 97,500 objects and had “nearly 1,471 artifacts on display in 25 galleries.”

The article didn’t go much past what we knew already vis-a-vis the museum, but it added to what we know about the situation in Egypt, post-Arab Spring. It said, for example:

While Egypt has always had its share of antiquity theft, now it’s more frequent, more efficient and more outrageous. Thieves have struck Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and ancient Christian sites from Abu Rawash north of Cairo to Luxor in the south. And they’re selling these treasures faster than ever, sometimes within hours.

“The last three years, there’s been a drastic situation, where you see at every archaeological site excavating without permission,” said Saleh Lamei Moustafa, a conservator of Islamic architecture. “They’re even bringing loaders. There are only 300 in the antiquities police, armed with pistols, and they’re fighting people with heavy weaponry.”

It also, unusually, referred readers to an op-ed in the Times’s arch-rival, the Washington Post, written by Mohamed Ibrahim is Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities and a professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University in Cairo. It was published last October, and asked for U.S. help. You can read that here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Associated Press via the NYT

The Cost of Poor Care: Multi-millions

When I saw a digital image of the Pontormo portrait of Cosimo I de Medici, which was up for sale at Christie’s yesterday, I fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful pose, a study in black. But then I heard from art historians about how abraded the surface was — some said they could not even stand to look at it.

452px-Cosimo_I_de_Medici_by_Jacopo_Carucci_(called_Pontormo)And surely, the presale estimate was a giveaway: $300,000 to $500,000 for a Pontormo? It would, some experts said, be worth $30 million to $50 million if it were in good condition. The Metropolitan Museum doesn’t even own a Pontormo. The Getty paid more than $35 million in 1989 for Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier — more than $65 million in today’s dollars.

Could varnish, retouching and other poor maintenance choices really destroy the picture that much? Who would do that?

Earlier this week, I went to Christie’s to see for myself — and while I can look at the picture, I did see the obvious problem. It’s flat and one can see the retouching brush strokes. Most of the damage, I was told, was done decades ago, not recently.

So I was very curious to see what happened at the sale. The hammer fell at $600,000 — and with premium the price was $725,000.

So someone still wanted the work.

But, boy is this a lesson in care.

Rothschild Prayerbook Squeezes Out A New Record, Sort Of

It was just by a sliver. This afternoon at Christie’s, when the Rothschild Prayerbook came up for sale, the final price including the premium was $13.605 million. Last time, in 1999, it fetched $13.379 million.

23369245_bConsidering that the book was sold in London last time, and therefore in pounds sterling, not dollars as today, the price could be construed as lower now. In pounds sterling, the price last time was £8,581,500 and today it was £8,215,583.

I was watching only online, so I could not tell who was bidding — the buyer was on the phone, and there seemed to be one other bidder, possibly in the room. But it’s difficult to know if that bidder was real. Last time, according to reported accounts, there were five bidders — all ardent suitors.

The hammer price was $12 million — exactly at the low estimate of $12 million to $18 million.

This is a bit of a disappointment, if not necessarily a surprise. Experts  outside of Christie’s told me that the illuminated manuscript market is notoriously difficult to discern. That Chinese bidder, who seemed so interested — according to Nicholas Hall, the Christie’s department chair — may not have come through. The Chinese bidding reputation might have suggested that.

On the other hand, maybe the buyer was the Getty — the underbidder last time. I await a press release.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s

Before You See “Monuments Men,” The Film

9780679756866_p0_v2_s260x420There’s at least one thing to know before you see how Hollywood, i.e. George Clooney, renders the story of the Monuments men and women who in the last days of World War II and soon thereafter saved so many precious works of art that Hitler had seized: I am sure that by now you know that the movie opens on Feb. 7.  It will be how so many people learn about what we know about them.

Clooney’s movie credits the book of Robert M. Edsel — and to my knowledge, as shown in the credits on IMDB, makes no mention of Lynn H. Nicholas, who in 1994 had published The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War.” That’s the book — the research — to which we owe the story of the Monuments men. Edsel credited Nicholas in his own book on the monuments crew, published in 2009. But not the movie.

So I was pleased to read The Wall Street Journal this morning, and to see a piece by Nicholas headlined What the Monuments Men Wrought. It recaps the tale and provides some anecdotes of her initial reports, and ends graciously this way:

During these interviews I was surprised at how interested each Monuments Man was in what the others had done—assuming, as most do, that they had worked closely together. But, in fact, they almost never saw one another in the field, nor were they able to communicate on a regular basis. So they were fascinated by the details of the various missions of their colleagues. I am sure that those who are no longer with us would be delighted by this cinematic re-creation of their exploits. Can’t wait to see it myself.