Luigi Palma di Cesnola: The Largest Export of Cypriot Antiquities

Luigi Palma di Cesnola was the American consul at Larnaca from late 1865 to 1876, and in those eleven years he took about 35,000 objects out of Cyprus [1, p. 23; 5, p. 84]. Most of them were sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York between 1872 and 1876, and he became the Museum's first director. No other single channel moved so many Cypriot antiquities abroad, and through the Museum's later sales his material reached Stanford, Sarasota and a great many private houses in the United States. He is the lawful trade's largest exporter and its most criticised excavator. He dug under Ottoman permits, exported in the open and sold to a public museum; he also emptied tombs by the thousand with almost no record, ignored a ruling against export in 1871 and assembled statues from parts that did not belong together. This entry follows his part in the trade in order and links the pages that set out the law and the numbers: firmans and partage for the Ottoman rules, and how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully for his place among the other channels. The portrait at the head of the page shows Cesnola himself.

The consul and his digging

Cesnola was born in Piedmont in 1832, earned American citizenship and the consulate in Cyprus by service in the American Civil War, where he arrived late in 1865 [5, p. 84]. He had no training as a scholar. The Met's catalogue of 2000, by Vassos Karageorghis, Joan Mertens and Marice Rose, notes that he had "easy access to experts" in the British Museum and the Antiquarium in Berlin, and a patron in New York, the hotelier Hiram Hitchcock, who helped him "unstintingly and unflaggingly with money, advice, and other assistance" [1, p. 19].

He dug with hired village labour, as the other consuls did. At Idalion, the village of Dali, he wrote that "by the end of my third year's explorations at Dali, I had opened some ten thousand tombs" [3, p. 83]. Besides the men he paid by the day, others "dug without permission from me, on their kismet as they termed it", and sold to whichever consul paid best [3, pp. 79, 82]. The appendix by the Met's president, John Taylor Johnston, to the American edition of his book counts 15 temples, 60,932 tombs in 65 necropoleis and 35,573 objects [5, p. 84]. Those figures are Cesnola's own and are best read as an order of magnitude; how the digging was organised and paid is set out in tomb-digging in Ottoman Cyprus.

His most important find was the sanctuary at Golgoi, near Athienou, in 1870, where "statues of gods, goddesses, heroes, and priests, some over-lifesize, were brought up in large numbers" [1, p. 19]. Karageorghis writes that "it is not certain how the Golgoi sculptures were found": Cesnola kept no record of where the statues lay, drew no plans of the building, and may not have been present throughout [1, p. 19]. The night the colossal head came out of the ground is told in The Night of the Colossal Head. In 1874 and 1875, digging for the Met, he worked mainly at Amathus and Kourion [2, pp. 20-21].

The Kourion treasure

The best-known result of the second campaign was the "Kourion treasure". Cesnola claimed to have found subterranean vaults beneath a temple at Kourion, filled with gold and silver, and published a measured ground plan of them, the only plan with measurements for any of his architectural discoveries [1, pp. 20-21]. Karageorghis writes that Cesnola wished "to emulate Schliemann by making a great discovery at an important site", and quotes him: "when I publish my last discoveries, they will throw forever into shade those of Schliemann" [1, pp. 20-21]. The treasure "certainly impressed the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum and allowed Cesnola to inflate the price at which he sold his collection", and when the truth came out his reputation "was damaged considerably" [1, p. 21].

The objects are ancient; the vaults were not found again. Karageorghis's explanation is that Cesnola came on some very rich tombs in the necropolis below the acropolis, perhaps built chamber tombs with barrel-vaulted roofs like one excavated by Demos Christou for the Department of Antiquities. That tomb, found half looted, still held gold beads that "correspond exactly" to those of a necklace in the Met (cat. no. 382), and it may have been opened first by Cesnola's men. On this reading, several such tombs "inspired" his account of a series of vaults [1, pp. 21-22]. A Kourion provenance for a piece in the treasure is therefore probably right for the area and wrong for the story.

The legal basis of his exports

Cesnola dug and exported under a personal Imperial firman, a permit from the Sultan, obtained soon after he arrived and renewed each year until 1872 [5, p. 84]. From 1869 the Ottoman regulation gave every antiquity found on private land to the landowner, which is why he bought the field at Athienou when he was told to send half his finds to Constantinople [6]. In 1871 the Governor-General ruled that his licence allowed him to dig but not to export [6]. Cesnola's first collection left Cyprus in breach of that ruling. It went out under a consular manoeuvre: in Anna Marangou's account, the order named the American consul, and he also held the Russian consulship. How the firmans, the regulations of 1869 and 1874 and the Ottoman objections worked, with the sources for each step, is set out in firmans and partage and not repeated here.

Edward Greene and Justin Leidwanger sum up the position: his work "appears generally to have been either sanctioned by the legal structures of the Ottoman government that oversaw the island, or at least not specifically condemned as illegal", and after 1872 "the lack of an explicit firman forbidding his activities, combined with some clever dissembling on the consul's part" let him carry on digging and exporting for several more years [5, p. 84]. The Ottoman Government objected to the export of 1871 to 1872 but did not try to recover the objects, and the Met's purchase was public. The Museum's catalogues do not set out how the second collection, dug in 1874 and 1875, was cleared for export under the regulation of 1874.

The Napried, 1872

Not everything arrived. In 1872 Cesnola agreed a sale to the Museum of Art in Boston, later the Museum of Fine Arts, and shipped 63 cases on the Napried, an Austro-Hungarian bark out of Split. She sailed from Cyprus for Beirut in April, loaded wool and olive oil there, and left on the evening of 19 June with about 5,000 inventoried objects, among them coins, statuary, grave stelai and gold jewellery. Early the next morning she caught fire and sank, probably off the coast of Syria or Lebanon [5, p. 84]. Cesnola wrote to Hitchcock on 2 July that the cases had gone "to the bottom of the sea with the entire cargo, the captain and crew saving themselves by a miracle. My boxes were not insured" [5, p. 84]. The wreck has not been found. Greene and Leidwanger use it as a test case for the UNESCO Convention of 2001 on underwater heritage; on their reading, ownership of the cargo would now turn on where it lies [5, p. 84].

The sales, 1871 to 1876

Cesnola sold in several markets at once. Two large batches of his antiquities were auctioned at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge in London in 1871, at a time when the buyers at such sales included the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and private collectors; General Pitt Rivers was buying from these sales that year [4, pp. 327, 329]. The Russian scholar Johannes Doell catalogued the collection for Saint Petersburg in 1870, but the Hermitage did not buy [2, p. 21]. In February 1872, 5,756 objects from the collection arrived in London, where Cesnola played the British Museum against the Metropolitan, with the Paris firm Rollin & Feuardent as his agents [2, p. 21]. Karageorghis describes the year as spent "haggling with representatives from Saint Petersburg, Berlin, London, Paris, and New York" [1, p. 22].

New York won. In December 1872 the Met's president, John Taylor Johnston, and his fellow trustees approved the purchase; the collection reached New York in 275 crates, some nearly nine feet long, and went on view in 1873 [1, p. 22]. The formal acceptance came in May 1874, which is why the accession numbers of the first collection begin with 74 [2, p. 21]. Cesnola went back to Cyprus under contract to the Museum, and in November 1876 the Met bought the second collection, with the "Kourion treasure" and the Amathus sarcophagus [2, p. 21]. The British Museum had offered £10,000 for it [4, p. 329]. Smaller groups went to British museums directly: in 1876 the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge bought 39 glass vessels from Cesnola objects left on deposit at the British Museum, and John Ruskin gave the Ashmolean two grave stelai he had received from Cesnola in return for supporting his excavations [4, p. 340]. Cesnola left Cyprus for good in 1876, became the Museum's secretary in 1877 and its first director in 1879, and held the post until his death in 1904 [1, pp. 22-23].

The later dispersals

Of the thirty-five thousand objects, "about six thousand remain in the Metropolitan Museum" [1, p. 23]. The rest left through the Museum's own sales. A large group went to Stanford University; others were sold "over-the-counter" at the Museum, mostly to private individuals; the duplicates set aside before the First World War were sold between 1916 and 1926; and the last went in two auctions at the Anderson Galleries in March and April 1928, at which the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota bought 2,300 objects [1, p. 23; 2, p. 23]. "There is no complete record of the destination of the pieces" [1, p. 23]. Some came back to the Met as gifts in 1941 [2, p. 23]. The sales, their catalogues and the Trustees' stated reasons are described in museums as sellers. Each sale took objects that had left Cyprus lawfully and placed them with new owners, which is why Cesnola material, with or without its papers, still turns up in regional American museums and family estates.

Alessandro di Cesnola

Alessandro Palma di Cesnola, Luigi's younger brother, worked in Cyprus in 1876 to 1878 at Luigi's invitation, mainly around Salamis, with money from Edwin Lawrence, whose daughter he later married [1, p. 23; 4, p. 327]. When the British High Commissioner banned all excavation in August 1878 he went on digging, was tried at Larnaca and had the finds of the illicit digging confiscated [7]. Part of what he had already gathered went to the Antiquarium in Berlin [1, p. 23]. The rest, almost 14,000 items, was refused by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and sold at Sotheby's in four sales between 1883 and 1892 for about £2,500, with lamps at four shillings and terracotta heads at two; Pitt Rivers bought 693 items [4, pp. 327-329]. Kiely and Ulbrich find it "difficult to disentangle Alessandro's ethics and methods from those of his brother Luigi whose lead he attempted to follow, though with less success" [4, p. 328]. The trial is described in illicit digging under British rule.

The case against calling it lawful

The strongest objection comes from the record of the digging. Sir George Hill's History of Cyprus judged that Cesnola's "depredations were inspired by no archaeological sense", and that he "did more harm to Cyprus archaeology by 'hogging' tombs and sites in search of antiquities than anyone else on record" [8, p. 607 n. 2]. Karageorghis wrote that "if one judges Cesnola and his methods by modern procedures, one must condemn him" [1, p. 19], and elsewhere, as Greene and Leidwanger quote him, that had the objects been excavated scientifically the collection would have been "the best source of information about Cypriot art", but "much of the scholarly and scientific value of the collection is lost forever" [5, p. 84]. Modern critics who describe the collection as plunder are describing this: tens of thousands of tombs opened by paid gangs, find-places lost or invented, and a celebrated treasure that cannot be put back together as a deposit. The village digging that fed his collection and his rivals' is described in tomb-digging in Ottoman Cyprus.

The second objection is to the objects themselves. Cesnola's rival Robert Hamilton Lang had complained of his restorations to the British Museum as early as 1868. In 1880 Gaston Feuardent, of the Paris firm Cesnola had used as his agents [1, p. 22], and the critic Clarence Cook accused him of having "reconstructed a certain number of statues from fragments that did not belong together and of having sometimes made modern additions, thus creating real fakes" [2, p. 21]. The libel case ended in early 1884 with a verdict for Cesnola, and a committee of experts found in his favour [1, p. 23; 2, p. 21]. The Met's catalogue of 2014 sets the record between the two sides: the worst interventions took place before the sculptures reached New York, and many statuettes still carry heads "whose pertinence is erroneous or doubtful", some removed only recently [2, p. 21]. The dispute and what came after it are set out in fakes, replicas and restoration. The third objection is the breach of 1871 described above.

Each objection is accurate, and none of them concerns title. Lawful export is not the same as careful excavation, and Cesnola's case shows the difference more plainly than any other: the digging was destructive, but the objects were bought from finders and landowners whom Ottoman law treated as owners, left the island in the open, and were sold to a public museum whose registers record their arrival. The Ottoman state, which had ruled against the export of 1871, did not pursue the objects. The breach of 1871 is the one point at which the export itself went against an official decision, and it concerns the first collection only.

A Cesnola history on the market today

A documented Cesnola history is among the strongest a Cypriot object can carry. It places the object outside Cyprus by the 1870s, more than half a century before the first British antiquities law and a century before the date-line of 1970 used by the modern market. The documents that prove it are public and printed: the Met's accession numbers (from 74 for the first collection), the plates of Cesnola's Descriptive Atlas (1885 to 1903), John Myres's Handbook of 1914, and the Anderson Galleries catalogues of 1928, whose entries refer to the Atlas and the handbook by plate or page [1, p. 23]. An old Met number painted on a pot, matched to one of these, settles its title and export.

Three cautions follow from the record. A Cesnola history rarely settles where an object was found, because most of the collection was recorded by site, if at all, and some site attributions, Kourion's above all, are unreliable [1, pp. 19-22]. Sculpture from the collection may not be whole: a head may belong to another body [2, p. 21]. And the name "Cesnola" on a dealer's description is a claim, not a proof; it needs the label, number or catalogue entry that matches the object, as set out in documenting a lawful history. The difference between where an object was found and who has owned it is explained in provenance and provenience.