Minneapolis Institute of Arts returns Greek pottery to Italy | State of the Arts | Minnesota Public Radio

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is handing over a piece of Greek pottery from 5th Century, B.C. to Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration in order to see that the object is returned to its rightful owner, the Italian government.

Athenian Red-figure Volute Krater
Attributed to the Methyse Painter, 460-450 B.C.
Image courtesy the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

The MIA purchased the Greek krater back in 1983 from a well known dealer. Since then it's held a prominent place in the museum's relatively modest antiquities collection.

But in 2006 a criminal investigation into another dealer, Giacomo Medici,
revealed a storehouse of images of looted objects. A few of those photographs depicted a krater that looked startlingly similar to the one in the MIA's collection.

Read about how the MIA traces the ownership of the art in its collection.

According to the MIA's director Kaywin Feldman, the staff at the MIA began looking into the ownership history of their Grecian krater to determine whether it might or might not be the object in question, but a change in museum leadership, and the departure of a department head resulted in the issue being dropped.

After I arrived here, sometime later, I started to notice that whenever these polaroid photographs were mentioned in books or in the media, Minneapolis was always listed among the cities that might have some of these objects. Out of curiosity I actually contacted the Italian ministry of culture a year ago.