Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg along with other US and Greek officials participated in a Manhattan ceremony on 15 December marking the return of 30 ancient works of art to Greece, collectively valued at $3.7m.Nineteen of the objects have been connected to the longtime New York gallerist Michael Ward, recently convicted of criminal facilitation of antiquities trafficking. Three were seized from the dealer Robin Symes, who is in the process of restituting personal holdings following nearly two decades of trafficking investigations. The return of the works to Greek Consul General Konstantinos Konstantinou and Secretary General of Culture Georgios Didaskalou caps a busy year of repatriations for the District Attorney’s Office.Included in the restitutions is a marble statue of the goddess Aphrodite, an ancient copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds a similar Roman copy in its collection, refers to the original as the “most famous Greek sculpture of a goddess” because of its groundbreaking portrayal of female nudity. The statue was recovered from a storage unit of Symes’s, where it was believed to have been hidden since at least 1999.From Ward’s inventory, the DA recovered a Corinthian helmet, a popular style worn by soldiers between the Archaic and Classical periods (around 700BCE-350BCE). The helmet was found to have been illegally trafficked from Greece and given false provenance in Germany, before being put on consignment to Ward in New York City.By far the oldest object returned is a 4,000-year-old marble figurine from the Bronze Age Cycladic culture. The work, which represents the most widely known type of Cycladic art, depicts a standing figure with folded arms. Many examples of the form remain intact today despite their age. The figurine recovered by the DA was seized from a private collector’s storage unit earlier this year.At the ceremony, Bragg reiterated his commitment to fighting looting and trafficking, stating that his office “will continue to aggressively investigate those who are using Manhattan as a base to traffic stolen antiquities”.Konstantinou remarked on the importance of the artworks recovered, saying: “Thanks to the superb efforts of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, 30 stunningly preserved artefacts are finally being repatriated. Their monetary value amounts to millions of dollars, but their actual value goes far beyond that. They are priceless for the Greek people.”
