Thanos N. Zintilis

The catalogue of Thanos N. Zintilis's collection of Cypriot antiquities states that none of the pieces was recovered in regular excavations². He was born in 1929 and described in authority records as a Cypriot businessman, honorary consul and collector of Cypriot antiquities¹¹. From 1975 to 1993 he was Honorary Consul General of Cyprus in the Netherlands^1,12.

Forming the collection

According to the review by Laurence Alpe, the collection was formed essentially in the 1950s and 1960s¹. Samuel Andrew Hardy, who uses the catalogue in a study of the Cypriot antiquities trade, also reports that most pieces were collected in those decades, when, in his words, "this was still possible"². He quotes its author, Stella M. Lubsen-Admiraal, as saying that find-spots were recorded "wherever possible" and that none of the antiquities was "recovered during regular excavations"².

The catalogue gives a few local origins. Object no. 537 came from the courtyard of Zintilis's home, and nos. 59 and 201 from farmers of his village, according to Hardy, who records them as licit finds².

Amsterdam, Athens and the catalogues

The collection was shown in public for the first time in 1989, in the exhibition Cyprus and Aphrodite in Amsterdam¹. The collection was long kept at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam, and since 2002 it has been at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens¹.

Lubsen-Admiraal catalogued it in the 2003 volume in the Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology series, Ancient Cypriote Art in the T. N. Zintilis Collection. Alpe counts 389 pottery, 79 stone, 57 terracotta figurine, 30 metal and 159 jewellery entries in it, with fabric descriptions and find-spots where known¹. A separate catalogue, Ancient Cypriote Art: The Thanos N. Zintilis Collection, was published in Athens in 2004 by the N. P. Goulandris Foundation^9,10.

Pieces cited in the literature

The collection supplies material for several specialist studies. A bronze bowl with three Cypro-Minoan signs under the rim, inventory number Z 730, was published in Kadmos by A. Kanta and M. Perna, who write that its archaeological associations are not known⁵. A Chalcolithic figurine from Kidasi, Zintilis 662, appears in Christine Winkelmann's study of Neolithic and Chalcolithic figurines⁶. Robert Stuart Merrillees and Thomas Kiely note that other pieces in the collection are said to come from Marion⁷.

Seven stone plank figures in the collection are discussed in studies of that figure type. S. E. Falconer, E. Monahan and P. L. Fall counted thirteen stone plank figures reported from Cyprus, four of them with excavation contexts and two in private collections, and they list the remaining seven as part of the Zintilis collection; the figures are purported to come from a cemetery at Kidasi-Foutsi in the Paphos district³. They add that stone fragments seen by Lubsen-Admiraal on the surface of the looted cemetery there bear little stylistic resemblance to the Zintilis figures³. Daisy Knox reads the same observation the other way: the seven did not come from a controlled excavation and are difficult to authenticate, but Lubsen-Admiraal's finding of looted tombs and stone fragments at the claimed source confirmed the origin and authenticity "as far as is possible"⁴.

Reception

Hardy argues that the catalogue's statement that none of the pieces came from regular excavations "itself implies that at least some of them were recovered through irregular (illicit) excavations", and that finds whose locations are uncertain "must have been finds with illicit origins"². These are Hardy's inferences about the collection's documentation. In the passage on the collection he does not accuse Zintilis personally of anything, and no charge, investigation or ruling concerning him is recorded².

In a note to his paper on Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, Violaris thanks Zintilis for making participation in the 1998 British Museum colloquium on Cyprus in the nineteenth century possible⁸.