ArtAncient

ArtAncient is a London gallery of ancient art founded by Costas Paraskevaides, a Cypriot who studied archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology while training in medicine at University College London, and who qualified as a doctor in 2008 before setting up the business^6,8. He directs it with Jethro Sverdloff, and both belong to the dealers' professional bodies: Paraskevaides serves on the boards of the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art and the Antiquities Dealers' Association, and the gallery belongs to the ADA, IADAA, the British Antique Dealers' Association, LAPADA and the BNTA^1,5.

We count ArtAncient among the most careful dealers working today. Research is the core of the business, with a provenance researcher on the staff, and the gallery gives particular weight to objects that were outside their probable countries of origin before the 1970 UNESCO Convention, and to objects with surviving export or regularising documentation¹. It names the identification and repatriation of objects to their countries of origin and rightful owners among its aims, and says its due diligence has recovered important provenance histories¹.

It has acted on that. In late 2023 Paraskevaides, reviewing thousands of auction lots as a matter of routine, recognised a Middle Bronze Age zoomorphic vessel offered in Germany under a vague "Eastern Mediterranean" label as a piece last recorded in Famagusta before 1974. The gallery bought it, informed the Department of Antiquities and returned it to Cyprus for display in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia⁸. Earlier it gave the British Museum an Iron Age bronze chariot lynchpin from Cambridgeshire, now on permanent display (2013,8044.1)⁶.

The gallery handles works of museum rank. Its research showed that the Sutton Place Herakles, a Late Hellenistic bust of about 100 to 30 BC bought at auction as a 19th-century copy, was ancient, and traced it to the collections of the Dukes of Sutherland and J. Paul Getty; the bust is now in the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi¹⁰. Other sales went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Louvre Abu Dhabi^1,2. ArtAncient shows at Frieze Masters every October and has exhibited at TEFAF Maastricht⁴.

Its Cypriot pieces include a large terracotta plank idol with a baby of about 2100 to 1900 BC, exported from Cyprus under licence in January 1969³, and an Archaic limestone head from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Golgoi, formerly in the Metropolitan Museum's Cesnola collection, which the gallery showed at Frieze Masters in 2025⁷.