Recent links of note:
“Looted antiquities returned to Turkey and Italy were seized from New York home of Met trustee Shelby White”
Claire Voon, The Art Newspaper
The Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has seized several ancient objects from the private collection of Shelby White, a collector and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Claire Voon reports for The Art Newspaper that these objects, among them a life-size bronze of the Emperor Lucius Verus valued at $15 million, have been returned to Turkey and Italy as a part of the investigation. Other objects identified and returned include a red-figure calyx krater, a “Bronze Bust of Man” from the first century B.C., a figurine of Apollo, and a cauldron with four animal heads. The Antalya Museum in Turkey recently held a “repatriation ceremony” to mark the return of the objects.
“Prince of Caricatura”
Freya Johnston, Literary Review
Crude, violent, grotesque, and pornographic are all adequate words to describe the caricatures of James Gillray (1756–1815), the British cartoonist and satirist. In Literary Review, Freya Johnston evaluates James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire by Tim Clayton, published on November 29 by Yale University Press. Gillray’s times contained no shortage of contemporary figures and events ripe for caricature: the American and French Revolutions, scandals surrounding the British royal family, and the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte all faced his scrutiny. In one shocking cartoon, Gillray portrayed the revolutionary sans-culottes of the French Revolution as bloodthirsty cannibals, keen to feast on the limbs of members of the French aristocracy and their children. In another, Napoleon farts into the sails of a lackluster French Navy to scurry his invasion force across the Channel, Gillray’s own reimagining of the Protestant Wind of 1588. Johnston praises Clayton’s biography of the witty caricaturist as “thoroughly researched and lavishly illustrated.”
“Sponsian: Another Lost Emperor”
Alfred Deahl, Antigone
Last week, Paul Pearson, a professor at University College London, published a study claiming that four gold coins depicting the name and image of a figure named “Sponsian,” long thought to have been eighteenth-century forgeries, are indeed real. The authenticity of the coins would suggest that Sponsian is a long-lost Roman general who ruled, according to Pearson, as a usurper-emperor in Roman Dacia during a period of “political disruption” in the third century. Many technical and historical hurdles remain, however, for Roman coin experts and historians to accept this as evidence for the existence of Sponsian, writes Alfred Deahl for Antigone. With unusual imagery on the obverse and reverse, abrasion patterns from production consistent with known forgeries, and several other questionable attributes, Deahl believes the coin to be fraudulent and Sponsian to be imaginary. Deahl is not alone in his criticism: Richard Abdy, the curator of Roman coins at the British Museum, has labeled the study and its findings as “full fantasy.”