2023-08-24 00:13:42
Updated Thursday, August 24, 2023 – 00:13
An art dealer warned two and a half years ago that there were objects from the Museum for sale on the internet. The notice was ignored by the deputy director of the institution
Main access to the British Museum, in London.EFE
Until 2,000 pieces They have been reported as “stolen, missing or damaged” at the British Museum, according to sources close to the investigation and quoted by The Daily Telegraph.
The event was discovered last week and new details have been revealed in recent days, but the news was not new to the museum itself: an art dealer already alerted the British Museum of Art. alleged theft of objects from the institution two and a half years ago. The institution’s response, however, was that “all the objects were justified”, as revealed by the BBC. .
The dealer Ittai Gradel “notified in February 2021 that he had seen objects belonging to the museum on the Internet. In an email response, the deputy director, Jonathan Williams, replied in July that” there was no indication that any crime had been committed. “They swept the scandal under the rug,” Gradel has said.
This international scandal has left in a very committed position to the director of the British Museum, the German historian Hartwig Fischer, who recently announced his intention to leave his post in 2024. His tenure, since 2016, has been marked by tensions with the Greek government over the Parthenon marbles.
Fischer confirmed on Tuesday that the British Museum first detected the disappearance of “a small number of objects” in 2021, but that it was during an audit carried out in 2022 that the true extent of the removals was discovered and when the investigation was opened which culminated in the dismissal and legal action against the main suspect, Peter Higgs, a veteran expert who had worked for the institution for 35 years.
“We have every reason to believe that this person has even more objects in his possession,” he said in statements collected by The Guardian. “My priority is to look after the incredible collection of the British Museum and our focus, in cooperation with the police, is going to be on the recovery of those pieces.”
He valor total of the stolen pieces is estimated at “several million euros“, although the gaps in the inventory of the Museum (which hoards up to eight million artifacts, of which only 80,000 are on public display) have made it difficult to identify and estimate thefts committed over almost a decade.
The revered museum last week acknowledged the theft of “small pieces,” including gold jewelry and precious stones dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century. Now it is confirmed that the number of artifacts stolen from their collections is much higher than to the initially estimated and that the institution fired several weeks ago the curator of Mediterranean Art Peter Higgs, for his alleged relationship with the incident.
Several of the “missing” pieces were even offered on eBay for a much lower value than estimated (an object from the Roman Empire, dating back more than 2,000 years, was supposedly sold for 40 pounds or 46 euros, when its estimated value was 56,000 euros).
According to The Art Newspaper, Peter Higgs was identified as the prime suspect by using an eBay pseudonym linked to a Paypal account also linked to a Twitter account where his real name and his position in the museum appeared. The first piece from the collections appeared on eBay in 2016.
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, has worked to minimize theft as “a highly unusual incident” and in emphasizing that the museum has taken extraordinary measures to guarantee the safety of its belongings, both those that are on display and those that rest in its warehouses. “We have strengthened our measures and we are working with our experts to have a complete inventory of what has been lost, damaged or stolen,” Fischer stressed.
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