Cleveland Museum of Art's Apollo sculpture is a star with intriguing past
Michael Bennett is a confident man these days. The Cleveland Museum
of Art's curator of ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman art believes
that he made the purchase of a lifetime in 2004, when he persuaded the
museum to buy a beautiful and controversial ancient bronze statue of
Apollo Sauroktonos, or Apollo the Lizard Slayer.
Bennett is now more certain than ever that the Apollo
may
be the world's only original work by the great ancient Greek sculptor
Praxiteles, or a product of his workshop soon after his death in
approximately 330 B.C. Only one other sculpture has been attributed to
Praxiteles, a marble statue of Hermes with the infant Dionysus, found at
Olympia in Greece in 1877, but some scholars say the work was completed
after the sculptor's death. Today, Praxiteles is known chiefly through
later Roman copies. "We may have here a work by his hand," Bennett said,
raising his voice in excitement while examining the sculpture at the
museum recently. "We're talking about Praxiteles!"
The sculpture, which stands 5 feet tall with a richly mottled green
and dark-red surface acquired from having been buried for centuries,
depicts a nude, adolescent boy preparing to spear a lizard with an
arrow.
The sculpture's right arm is missing from above the elbow and the
left arm is gone from the shoulder down, although the museum has the
left hand and forearm -- and the tiny, squiggly lizard Apollo was
getting ready to kill.
After several years in storage, the sculpture and its detached pieces
are ready to play a starring role in the museum's newly renovated
galleries of ancient and medieval art, scheduled to open Saturday.
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."
VIEW GALLERY
