The Louvre exhibits for the first time works of art seized at different customs points in France, which were stolen in Syria and Libya, taking advantage of the armed conflicts in the region to introduce them into the illegal art market.
The sample that the Louvre Museum mounted with works stolen and intercepted at customs, open until December 13, is made up of six pieces confiscated between 2012 and 2016: four marble statues that represent the torso of a woman in life size and two decorative plates with Christian motifs, measuring 70 by 40 centimeters, of the same material. These works are the protagonists of two judicial processes whose objective is to find out who their rightful owner is and to punish those responsible for the theft. The museum has taken advantage of a 2016 reform of the Heritage Code that allows these confiscated pieces to be displayed while the trial lasts.
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The decorative plaques with Christian motifs were found at the Parisian airport Charles de Gaulle customs in 2016, packed into boxes. The art historians who have analyzed them believe that they come from Syria, but have not specified where they came from. The people who transported them, who made the Lebanon-Thailand route, said that they were “decorative elements of the garden”. The origin of the statues is known: “They are so similar to the style of the place, that we know they come from the necropolis of Cyrene (north of Libya). In fact, they have a reddish sand typical of the region stuck to them ”, explains the curator of the exhibition, Ludovic Laugier, without going into details so as not to jeopardize the investigation. His style, in his opinion, is a mix between ancient Greek culture and the Cyrenean pre-existing to the Hellenic occupation of the region. “Although they come from a cemetery, it seems that they do not represent the deceased but rather a deesa related to death. It could be a representation of Persephone, queen of the underworld in the Greek world ”, adds the expert.
Two of the four statues are missing their heads, but Laugier attributes that beheading to an earlier moment in history and disassociates him from illegal trafficking. According to their figures, this traffic moves a business volume of 10 billion euros a year and sometimes serves to finance crimes, such as the sale of weapons. The six works exhibited since May 19 could have fetched hundreds of thousands of euros on the black market.
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The theft and illegal sale of art also make the traceability of the pieces and the information that they could provide us “about civilizations and our common history” lost. That is why the Louvre hopes to raise awareness with this exhibition: “Many works stolen in countries at war can be found on the internet in an accessible way. We believe that if the general public is aware of this phenomenon, they will not fall for this type of purchases from dubious dealers ”, concludes Laugier.
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