The Euphronios Krater Returned to Italy
The looted 'hot pot' that forced the Met to confront its own collecting
Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record $1 million for a dazzling sixth-century BC Greek vase painted by Euphronios. Decades later it was proven to have been looted from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri — and in 2008 the Met returned it to Italy.
It was the most beautiful pot money could buy — a calyx-krater painted around 515 BC by Euphronios, showing the dead Sarpedon lifted by Sleep and Death. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it in 1972 for a then-unheard-of $1 million, curators celebrated a masterpiece. Reporters soon nicknamed it the 'hot pot'.
The Met said the krater came from an old private collection. In fact it had been dug illegally from an Etruscan tomb at Greppe Sant'Angelo, near Cerveteri, and funnelled onto the market by the dealer Robert Hecht, with the tomb-robbers' fragments passing through the networks that Italian investigators would later map in detail.
For thirty years the vase stood as the centrepiece of the Met's antiquities galleries and, increasingly, as a symbol of everything wrong with the trade in unprovenanced antiquities. Italian magistrates built their case patiently, and the seized photographic archives of dealer Giacomo Medici supplied the corroboration.
In 2006 the Met agreed to return the krater along with other contested objects; in January 2008 it went home to Rome. Displayed first at the Villa Giulia and later at Cerveteri, near where it was looted, it became the emblem of a new era in which great museums could no longer afford to ignore how their treasures reached the display case.
The Euphronios krater did more than change hands. It changed the rules — accelerating stricter acquisition policies, provenance research, and a wave of restitutions that continues to this day.