Christie’s Stands by Its Decision to Sell a $1 Million Roman Sculpture Despite Its Links to a Disgraced Dealer

Christie’s has defended the
planned sale of a Roman marble statue due to hit the block next
week in London after an expert claimed it could have passed through
the hands of the disgraced antiquities dealer Robin
Symes.

The first-century marble
sculpture of the god Eros unstringing his bow, which is a cover lot
of the sale on December 4, has an upper estimate of £800,000 ($1
million). The archaeologist Christos
Tsirogiannis, who has
spotted many Symes-tainted artifacts in the past, has accused the
auction house of neglecting to conduct thorough research,
which he says would link it to the dealer. The scholar says the
connection is corroborated by at least four photographs
showing Symes with the statue. 

Symes fell from grace after the
death of his long-term partner and business associate, Christo
Michaelides, in 1999. In a legal battle with Michaelides’s family,
Symes’s vast stock of antiquities, many with shady provenance, was
discovered in various storage facilities. Greek and Italian
officials also uncovered an archive documenting illegally acquired
antiquities. In 2016, a
trove of stolen objects belonging to Symes was recovered at the
Geneva Freeport in Switzerland by Swiss and Italian
police.

Tsirogiannis,
who is an associate professor at
Denmark’s Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of
Aarhus, is an expert in the trade of illicit antiquities (and a
veritable thorn in the side of auction houses). He is one of the
few who has access to the Symes archive, which he was granted by
Greek and Italian authorities for his research. Tsirogiannis has
collaborated extensively with Interpol in the repatriation of
artifacts to their source countries.

“Here we have the
much-advertised due diligence process of Christie’s that has
largely failed since it missed the most important part—the
connection to Symes and Michaelides, notorious antiquities dealers
connected with numerous cases of illicit antiquities,”
Tsirogiannis told The
Guardian. 

Christie’s insists that the
provenance of the statue of Eros is sound. In a statement, the auction house said:
“This marble is known to have been in the collection of French
writer, Roger Peyrefitte (1907–2000), Paris, France, since the
later 1960s. [It was] acquired from Peyrefitte by the present owner
in 1986.” The sculpture
is listed as coming from “the property of a
gentleman.” 

Christie’s stressed that it devotes “considerable time and money
to investigating the objects in our care.” It also called for
greater cooperation between academics and those who have access to
archives to collaborate on research.

The post Christie’s Stands by Its Decision to Sell a $1
Million Roman Sculpture Despite Its Links to a Disgraced Dealer
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