The Riace Bronzes： Ethics & The Art Market in Ancient Rome

Good evening, everybody, and welcome to this lecture in a series of masterclasses that Sotheby's Institute of Art faculty are presenting this year. I'm talking about the Rialti Bronzes, Ethics of the Art Market in Ancient Rome. So, nearly 40 years ago, on the 16th of August 1972, Stefano Mariottini, a chemist, spending his vacations with his parents in Calabria, the Toa of Italy. Calabria, by the way, is a wildly beautiful but economically impoverished region of the Toa of Italy. Mariotti was scuba diving around 300 metres off the coast in eight metres depth of water, when he spotted a human forearm projecting from the seabed in apparent rigor mortis. What happened next was tragic, but unfortunately typical of underwater archaeology. There being no local or national underwater archaeological emergency response team, and because of the black comedy situation that this could be a murder case, the local Caribbean area, or armed police, were called in to investigate. After confirmation that the body was not nature, but culture, a hard metallic bronze and not a human corpse, an underwater archaeology team eventually arrived, and on the 21st of August, unfortunately a bank holiday period, the statutes, now rather unromantically known as A and B, were raised from the depths using a combination of balloons filled with pressurised air, supplemented by old oil drums because of insufficient balloons. The statutes, this is statute A, the next day on the beach, came to the crowded holiday beach, where like a scene from Jaws, the public were waiting in nervous anticipation of what would emerge from the ocean. The enigmatic art objects turned out to be the most beautiful and sensual life-size statues of naked men at the peak of their physical fitness, turning most of the male beach bums in their swimming costumes to shame as their women compared the pectoral muscles and iliac crests and bottoms of their own real world men with the virtual muscles of the statue. There's another view you can see here in the statute B. I've shown you a detail of the incredible, realistic indeed, naturalistic detail of the tendons running down into the hands, the pubic area, very, very naturalistic, very realistic, and if you actually look at the nails of these figures, these bronze figures, they've even got like the cuticles in them, and of course that is enabled by the technique of using loss wax process, where the wax is a soft material, of course, where you can actually get very, very realistic details, should you wish, and they come out, of course, eventually in the hardened bronze layer. Simultaneously to this scene, the piedone, as the Italians call them, these are the pious elderly women dressed in black, often widows, were standing like a Greek tragic chorus on the fringes of the action, and they crossed themselves at what they believed to be the epiphany of their own local Christian saints, Cosimo and Damian, well-known saints of the sea with miraculous healing powers. The saints' festival was about to climax in the month of September. There's a photograph here of that event, steering these relics with Cosimo and Damian, standing on either side of the relic here, out to sea. The French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his 1984 essay, Distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste, famously described this polar response to the art object as a test of our ethical reactions to art. He says, only pure pleasure, ascetic, empty pleasure, which implies the renunciation of pleasure, is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence. The work of art, therefore, a test of ethical superiority. The piedone had passed Bourdieu's test by responding to the pure aesthetics of the pagan statues in an act of sanctification, which metamorphosed the pristine meaning of the statues into Christian saints, compared to the oppositional response of the other people on the beach, who were basically looking at these as sex objects. This particular reception of the two statues has been further enriched by a recent hypothesis that the local Christian cult of Cosimo and Damian had replaced an earlier pagan cult of the heroic twins, Castor and Pollux. Any of you in the room who are star-signed Gemini, those are these two bright stars we can see at the start in the sky at the moment. These are Castor and Pollux, the twins. Anyway, they've hypothesized that Cosimo and Damian are so often when Christian culture metamorphoses from pagan culture, the older pagan gods and heroes will be metamorphosed into Christian saints, and that the bronzes are iconographically similar to ancient statues of the twins. We see them, the famous ones here on the Capitoline Hill, Campidoglio in Rome, and typically they stand beside their war horses, and you can see the Briachi bronzes over here, and maybe compare them with these late Roman marble statues that were probably originally intended to decorate baths. In hindsight, from an archaeological perspective, it was an ethical error for the statues to have been recovered immediately following their discovery. The standards and procedures of an orthodox archaeological underwater excavation were not followed. These only began to be properly discussed and developed when underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology, as it's now called, became more broadly established as an academic sub-discipline of terrestrial land archaeology in the 1970s, when these statues were found in the early 1970s. Typically, a correct procedure would involve a floating platform above the sea marine site as a stable mission control centre, GPX fitzing, which isn't available in 1972 of course, visually marked by a buoy, three-dimensional surveying employing grids, depth gauges and tape measures, which are now, by the way, being replaced by high-tech acoustic tracking. As in a terrestrial excavation, the site would be gradually uncovered using pumps instead of trowels, and all finds and their locations would be recorded on the grid to create an interdisciplinary and three-dimensional survey. The carabinieri seen here simply lifted the two statues and transported them to the beach. Photographs taken during this process show that absolutely essential dating materials were lost, including a piece of amphora, the ancient Roman terracotta storage vessel, which was lodged under the arm of this statue, Statue B. These are underwater photographs and the resolution's not good. You can see the balloons, by the way, being used here, being pumped with oxygen tanks to lift the statues. Now, that piece of amphora would have dated the wreck. We've got very good systems of dating using typologies of amphora, and resolved many broader issues concerning the date of the wreck, as well as where the ship was sailing from and to, and more about the nature of its cargo. The early photographic record also provides evidence of another missing part of the statue, Statue B. This is a sword handle you can just see in this photograph from a magazine. That was originally in the hand, and that's just gone missing. This has led to claims, this Italian newspaper, that the weapon, shields, and helmet may have been stolen and smuggled to the Getty Museum, quotes, and that there was even a third statue. The Getty has refuted these claims, but once again, the situation may not have arisen had an ethically correct excavation taken place. A more correct excavation was carried out a year later, August to September 1973, by an experimental underwater archaeology unit from the Institute of Ligurian Studies. The original find spot was confirmed by the discoveries of B's shield handle. Very little else was found of the wreck. So, basically, this on this map here shows the coast at Riachi Riachi Marina. This is the area where the bronzes were found, and this is a closer view of that area, and you can see the two statues that were originally lying here, and there's the other parts of the drawing show bits of the shipwreck. But very little else was found from the wreck, and it's impossible to say whether this was a complete, a complete sunken ship. This could have been due to the much stronger currents encountered in shallow waters, which carry materials far from their original wreck site. But some scholars have suggested an interesting and reasonable alternative explanation. Namely, the bronzes were deliberately jettisoned during a storm. Think of the story of Jonah and the whale. Okay, they throw him overboard because there's a storm, and they think that he's the reason why they might placate some kind of pagan god. But, of course, he is then swallowed by the whale, etc., etc. But there's lots of stories of deliberately jettisoning material. I'm thinking, again, of the New Testament. St. Paul, in his travels, has a lot of these storms, and they even throw the mast overboard sometimes. Other finds in that later archaeological excavation underwater included 28 lead rings, seen here in the local museum at Reggio Calabria now. These rings are associated with ship rigging, and a piece of wood here, interpreted as the mainstay for the ship's mast. It was common practice to jettison the mast during a storm, as I said, in order to get rid of the sail, to stop the ship being blown into shallow water. This satellite image shows why wrecks may have occurred in this particular area, with the Cape Riaci to the northeast of Riaci itself. So this is the find spot, this area here, and you can see it's right on a bend of the Tour of Italy, which can cause very difficult sailing conditions. This second explanation is particularly relevant to debates on maritime law, because it relates to an interesting passage in the late Roman imperial legal digest of the Emperor Justinian, alive in the 6th century CE. This explains the law of salvage, namely that objects deliberately jettisoned from a ship in order to prevent its sinking remain the property of the original owner, not the salvager. The passage informs us that there were professional salvage divers, you can see in the Latin here, called urinatores. Here's a mosaic showing one of these urinatores underwater, surrounded by fish with this little animal skin being used as an aqualung. So this is Egyptian. Visual representation suggests that they breathed from tubes inserted into amphorae in the Roman period, which thus acted as primitive aqualungs. An interesting aspect of the ancient law is that a claim could not be made for non- jettisoned goods, because there had been no attempt to save the ship itself. Work that one out. From the moment of their recovery, the ethics of provenance became an issue. The statues were taken to the museum at Reggio Calabria, the nearest city to Capriaceae, and the museum attempted removal of marine accretions and incrustations with manual tools. The museum soon realized, this is the head of statue B, statue A, as it was discovered, but the museum soon realized that it was ill-equipped for the conservation of the bronzes, and the ethically correct decision was made by the Consiglio Nazionale dei Beniculturali, the cultural government wing in Italy, to transport them to the renowned conservation center in Firenze, in Florence, in the north of Italy. The bronzes were carefully cleaned, look at this, with state-of-the-art ultrasound tools, a bit like the things they use to remove plaque in the dentist now. However, this change of location from the financially and culturally impoverished, relatively speaking, Mezzogiorno, or south of Italy, to the wealthy artistic center of Tuscan Florence, was to prove a problem over the next decade. The people of both Reggio and Florence fell in love with the statues, which were glorified by both the national and local media, in the manner of culture heroes. I remember these statues being found, and I remember an Italian archaeologist coming over to the Institute of Classical Studies in London and showing us slides, the first pictures we'd seen of these statues. I'm not kidding you, they were just oohs and aahs as we saw these statues. The reason being that if you study classical art before 1972, we've got lots of Roman marble statues of this type of contrapposto, earlier Greek statue, replicas in marble, but we didn't have any of the bronze originals. That's why these were so, it's one of the reasons why they're so stunning. The other reason, they're just incredibly beautiful and aesthetic. I'll talk more about this, I'm being a bit subjective here. So, the people of both Reggio and Florence, just to repeat, fell in love with the statues, which were glorified by both the national and local media in the manner of culture heroes. They were a big hit throughout Italy. Look at this, in 1980, eight years after they were discovered from the sea, after the removal of accretions, they were displayed in Florence and exhibiting the phenomena of pop stars began a selective stage show tour through Italian cities. Look at the crowds queuing up to go into the museum here. During these displays, the national media began to argue that a return to Reggio in the south would not be appropriate for such important cultural stars and that tourists, as on the 18th century Grand Tour, would be reluctant to travel so far south in Italy to view the bronzes. You can see the two bronzes set apart here in this particular display, statue B and statue A. The national Italian government had, however, made a faux pas at the time of their discovery by their official decision to allocate them to the Reggio Museum, who immediately accessioned them with the catalogue numbers 12801 and 12802, which is an irreversible process in Italian state museums as it is in the UK. Commemorative postage stamps of 1981, you see on the slide, reinforced this local ownership. Reggio began to boast that their museum was now superior to the Athens National Museum because, they argued, the two bronzes outshone the famous so-called Poseidon, probably Zeus, discovered in a fisherman's net in the mid-20th century, and one of the other very few bronzes from the great classical period of the 5th century BC that we still have. There were many thousands of these, by the way, we know from archaeology and from literary sources, they were just melted down at the end of the classical period by invaders who had no use for them other than to turn them into weapons very often. Just to go back to those stamps, you can see the stamps are immediately saying Museo Nationale Reggio Calabria, and they're from Brugheriaceae. It became very, very difficult because they had been accessioned properly and catalogued properly, so there's a little moral there for those who are thinking of working in museums. Whenever something comes into your museum, record it, accession it immediately, catalogue it immediately. The museum at Reggio Calabria also countered the tourist catch appeal that the Florentine and Roman shows of the statues by creating an oppositional environment in which the statues were not to be displayed in a shrine of their own, but within the established underwater finds section of the museum, along with the famous philosopher head, here it is, from the Porticello wreck, properly excavated, in 1969-70, but unfortunately already had been plundered and dispersed onto the art marker. 300,000 visitors came to see them over a two-month period from August 1981. This is in Reggio Calabria in the Toa of Italy. This claim introduces another ethical point, that of ethical and legal title to cultural property. The slide, by the way, shows them as they were then. They've been moved quite a lot in the museum back into conservation, which takes place now in the museum, and then back onto public display. We have another ethical point, that of ethical and illegal title to cultural property. If works can be proven to have been produced in a particular nation, should they eternally belong to that nation? The Elgin and Pergamon marbles, or Parthenon and Pergamon marbles, if you prefer, are the core celebre provenance issues, but these were deliberately removed by the English and Germans, respectively, in relatively recent times. It's only the lack of retrospective ruling in the UNESCO cultural property agreement of the early 1970s which hinders the legal arguments for their return to Greece and Turkey. Much of the early reception of the Riaches involved issues of original provenance and attribution. Some of the leading classical scholars of the 1970s, including Brunhilde Ridgway, had argued from the early photographs and pre-restoration views that the statues were Roman copies from the Hadrianic period in the 2nd century CE. The application of contemporary technology supported the view that the statues were indeed both 5th century BCE originals, and that they were made in Greece. For example, the bronze was found to contain no lead, an addition of the Hellenistic and Roman periods in bronzes, and traces of animal hair and clay cores used to produce the statues revealed organic provenance which precludes a southern Italian or Sicilian provenance, but includes the region of Attica, the area around Athens, and Argos in the Peloponnese, south of Athens, in mainland Greece. Both of them, by the way, key centres of sculptural production in the ancient classical period. As with art objects from other periods, a more ethically objective approach to testing provenance, combining traditional connoisseurship with science, has rapidly emerged, of course, in our last generation. More recent studies of the dowels or tenons, you can see them in the bottom of the case here, employed to fit the bronzes to their original marble bases, has confirmed that the techniques involved are typical of the period 470 to 450 BCE, and this adds support to the connoisseurship argument which argues the two statues display typical stylistic features of what we call the early to high classical periods, such as contrapposto and remarkable anatomical realism, allied with vitalism. Scientific investigative techniques have recently become more ethically acceptable, mainly because they're far less invasive and destructive than they used to be. New methods of mass spectrometry have enabled very detailed analysis of the radiocarbon properties from samples of just a few milligrams taken from the casting cores of these bronzes. The resulting radiocarbon dating concords with all the other criteria supporting a 5th century BCE date of production. Everything points to the statues having been originally produced and consumed in Greece, and scholars have even suggested exact locations, such as commemorative ensembles of military heroes in cult sites like Apollo's Delphi or Zeus's Olympia. If the statues were Greek, as now seems highly likely, then what were they doing at the bottom of the sea off the southern Italian coast? A closer look at the find spot indicates a sea route from the Greek mainland, across here, to the ports of Rome, such as Pozzuoli, just north of Naples, and Ostia at the mouth of the River Tiber. In antiquity, merchant traders hugged the coast as much as possible so as to avoid total exposure to storms far from land. We've already examined the two main theories reconstructing the final moments of the bronzes, that the entire ship was wrecked with the bronzes on board, or that the heavy bronzes were thrown overboard, jettisoned, in order to save the ship. The reasons for their transportation from Greece to Italy points to the art collecting, and of course art looting, habits of the Romans and their armies in antiquity. The literary sources are full of references to Roman generalissimos plundering Greek temples and cities in the eastern Mediterranean in order to bring back fine and decorative art in visually impressive military triumphs, as well as to adorn the city of Rome. It's highly likely that these sculptures were indeed looted from Greece during the second century BCE, or the first century up to the first century CE, and the lost amphora shirt already referred to would have helped to confirm a more exact date. Although no one has questioned the modern claims to ownership of the statues by the Italian state, there is an absolutist ethical argument that the statues of Greek were looted as an act of war, and therefore should be returned to Greece. However, because of the generally accepted application of historical relativism, especially to objects removed prior to 1970, and the UNESCO convention, these more absolute arguments concerning legal title remain inactive and impotent. The looting activities of ancient Roman generals, unethical in themselves, created a web of related unethical art business activities, many of which are all too familiar in today's art market. The looted works underwent a selection process, and those considered of less monetary value were sold at auction to generate liquid assets for the general. It's interesting that literary sources, written by highly educated Romans, usually of republican leaning, anti-monarchy, anti-emperor, always imply that the looters are behaving in an unethical manner. This perturculus quotation is particularly relevant to the case of the Realci bronzes, as it indicates that works were often damaged or lost during their transportation. The Roman general Mummius, who conquered Corinth, is portrayed as an aesthetic philistine who doesn't understand the uniqueness of the artistic creation, as opposed to the copy. Mummius was so lacking in culture that when he captured Corinth and was arranging for the transportation to Italy of paintings and statues, which were masterpieces by the hands of the greatest artists, he warned those in charge of the transportation that if they destroyed any of the statues and paintings, they'd have to replace them with new ones. The great republican orator and statesman Cicero, when he is a lawyer, his prosecution of Gaius Veris, the governor of Sicily, may be exaggerated, but it provides us with interesting information about art, monetary value, and extortion in ancient Rome. Veris is seen here deliberately bullying other Sicilian art collectors into selling works for a fraction of their value. $16,000, the equivalent for works which Cicero implies would sell for over a million dollars in an open auction today. I'll just give you a moment to read that quotation. Sounds very familiar, doesn't it? These names, by the way, Pratsitales, he created the first ever public nude female statue of the Aphrodite Venus of Cnidus, which shocked the world when they saw it. Maran created the discus stroa, Polykleitos created arguably the most famous male statue in antiquity, the spear-bearer, or doryphoros, which originally was a bronze that stood, very similar by the way, a bit later than the Riachi bronzes, in full contrapposto on the Acropolis at Athens. Early media reports concerning the Riachi bronzes demonstrate that they became part of local folklore. We've seen their reception as incarnations of Christian saints and of national mythology. This is most evident in their manifestations as popular culture and as marketing tools for other desirable products. Here we see them employed in the marketing of other cultural products, in this case cars. You see how different Renaults looked in the 1970s. Oh, and the two bronzes are both saying, oh, the Renault 9 and the Renault Undici, and that you can save up to three and a half million. Now that isn't euros, it was liras in those days, as some of you like me will remember, on interest, and you get interest-free credit. They are used as reference points for political stature, for satire. This is a cartoon in an Italian newspaper suggesting that not the bronzi, but i bonzi, and any Italians in the room will understand that. Al Quirinale, now that Al Quirinale is the president, the Roman president's residence in Rome, and they were on display in the museum on the other side of the piazza there, so it was a great joke. This is Giovanni Spadalini that they were satirizing in the cartoon. You might want to turn your heads away here. They became the subject of pornographic fantasy in the 70s. The ethical question here is familiar. Does the incorporation of high cultural aesthetics into popular media denigrate the art and corrupt the process of reception? I'm thinking back to Pierre Bourdieu's idea that do we see these statues as naked pornographic figures? In the Succia comics created in Italy, basically what happens is that it's a great story actually. They're on a cruise ship and they have sexual adventures with the passengers on the cruise ship, and one of them turns out to be gay and the other heterosexual. I won't go any further with this, but you can see the sort of thing. Finally, a paper in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology of 2004 by Nigel Constam and Herbert Hoffman raised one last ethical issue concerning the difference between the process of artistic creation and the mechanical replication of the real human body. In 1998, Constam had made accurate measurements of both statues and was surprised to discover that many of their anatomical features were exactly alike, leading to the possibility that the same moulds had been used for certain parts of the bodies, and to the more controversial argument that these moulds might have been plaster casts of a real body or bodies. Their hypothesis is that this was a technique employed in the Renaissance and after, and it does not exclude an artistic aspect because the sculptors can manipulate the soft wax and modify proportions such as torso and leg lengths. It's significant, therefore, that it's the undersides of the feet of both statues. You can see again how magnificently naturalistic the feet of the statues are. Look at the toes and the cuticles and the toenails and the tendons. It's significant the undersides of the feet appear to be the most similar and indeed display, as you can see here, the marks of a real human foot standing in a plaster puddle. The authors concluded, quote, there is no reason that the Greeks should not have cast bodies from life. Other than that, to the modern mind, it seems like cheating, sort of AI of antiquity. Their artistry becomes more human as a result of the discovery, they said. I love that. We must remember that until relatively recent discoveries of coloured pigments on marble sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome, it seemed out of the question that the aesthetically pure Greeks would have coloured their sculptures. There's been a lot of arguments about the Parthenon frieze. Was it coloured or wasn't it? I mean, most scholars now, they've found some pigments on parts of the superstructures of the Parthenon. Almost certainly they were originally painted, but they'd lost the paint with weathering. Here's an example, Cambridge Archaeology Museum, they've got a plaster cast of what now looks like a mainly pure white marble statue in the Acropolis Museum in Athens from the 6th century BCE. The scientific studies of pigments on the surface show that the statue originally looked more like this. Women, by the way, their flesh was left in the white of the marble. The royalty bronzes are interesting. So you didn't often get bronzes of women because of their white flesh, because even the goddesses are thought to stay in the household and not develop the kind of UV tans that the men who do a lot of athletics, pretty naked outside would make. So bronzes, particularly when they're polished, would look particularly naturalistic. It's fitting to end by observing the naturalism of the original bronzes. I've just shown you some details here. Like the marbles, they've lost their colouring due to weathering. So they originally looked like a bronzed guy, basically. The copper oxidises to a matte copper oxide patina, as you all know, but the originals would have gleamed as bronze news in the sun. And their nipples and lips, you can see the lips here of one of the statues, were copper red. Their teeth of silver, statue B actually has his mouth open, statue A doesn't, and their eyes were of ivory and limestone, which were inserted into like a little bronze case in the eye. So you can see here that this is one of the statues before being cleaned, the eye, and here it is after being cleaned. In looking at these wondrous creations of two and a half thousand years ago, we must constantly recall the ethics of reception, which involves an imaginative adjustment to the pristine appearance of the works, a shock to our aesthetic sensibilities, including the possibility of human models, because these sculptures were clearly meant to look very lifelike. So if you want to read the academic footnoted article that I based this lecture on, here is the bibliographic record, 2014. It's in a book by, you might want to make a screenshot of this of Valentina Vardi, who'd invited me with Hildegard Schneider to Maastricht to a conference on marine archaeology. I presented this paper and the title is Art, Cultural Heritage and Markets. Very good book actually filled with all, particularly for any of you interested in law and ethics. So thank you for listening and any questions. So I'm just going to stop sharing my slides so I can see whether we have any questions in the chat. Please feel free to type into the, I think you can type into the, any questions in. Don't think we have any questions. So I've just realised that I finished quite early. I think I'd given you a timing of six to seven. So I apologise for that, but I think you'll agree. I hope you agree that this is very rich material and I hope you'll have a very good evening and I hope you enjoyed listening to that. I did give my email address in the first slide of what I might do actually. Oh, wait a minute. We have got a question. Oh, we've just, I've just got a thank you, David. That's fine, Federica. Thank you very much. Oh, wait a minute. Alice has asked, is there any exhibition about this topic in London this year? I don't believe so, Alice. The only exhibition I remember, I mean, the bronzes, I'm hoping one day they might travel the world, but obviously there are ethical issues even about moving these things from Reggio Calabria. They've already nearly been sort of taken from them when they went into Italy, but also, you know, it can be quite damaging to move this kind of stuff logistically. The only exhibition I remember recently was a great one at the British Museum, which was about colour on Greek statues. Katie, it's really good to see you here from St Ives. Alma, thank you for your, thank you for your gratitude as well. Any other questions? Oh, by the way, they did again, in answer to Alice's question about an exhibition about this topic, the Royal Academy did have an exhibition about 12 years ago, I think, called Bronzes, which just looked at bronzes from all periods, you know, just looking at the material and then, you know, it's quite often ignored or, you know, we don't think much about it. But I think when we're looking at bronze sculptures, the more you look at them, the more you realise they have their own aesthetics. And as I've said, with the Ricci bronzes and the Poseidon in Athens National Museum, we're not looking at them as they would have looked, they would have looked really naturalistic. We think that they don't look very natural, but they were. Right. Okay. I think I will call it a day there. I don't think we, I don't think we have. Thank you. Oh, wait a minute, here we are. Alessia has asked, in your opinion, where would be the best place for them? Okay, that's a very good question, Alessia. I love the fact that they're in a local museum near where they were found. It brings tourism into the place. Typically, people will be in Sicily, which is a much more visited place by cultural tourists, Sicily, than on the Tour of Italy in Calabria. But it's a very short journey from Messina, where you can get like a hydrofoil in 20 minutes across to Reggio Calabria port. You can then just get a taxi up to the museum and look at them there. And honestly, the museum is amazing. It's got the most amazing Greek and Roman, because remember, the Greeks were colonising in the south of Italy and Sicily. It's got a lot of underwater material in the rooms near the Rialti Bronzes. I think that I would like, I prefer that for them to be there. Don't ask me about the Parthenon Marbles, you might get a different answer. And I've been there many times, by the way, when I've been, I'm usually in Sicily, and I will always try and take the boat across to look at them again. Happy New Year, Alice. The geography, yeah, it was Magna Graecia, Alessandra, which the Romans, you will know in Latin literature, they refer to the south of Italy and Sicily as Great Greece. You know, it's a bigger, remember Syracuse, Syracuse in Sicily, which is a Greek colony, was bigger than Athens. It was the biggest Greek city in the world, and it was in Sicily. Remember that Naples, Napoli, meaning from the ancient Greek Neapolis, new city, that was a Greek colony originally. I think Anna has asked, is this common situation now the court cases regarding the ownership of ancient artifacts? It's very interesting. Marine archaeology is difficult. You know, you even hear this in politics, don't you, that a boat, you know, a boat is sailing in national waters, and we warn the Royal Navy or whichever Navy warms to get out. It's the subject of James Bond stories, isn't it, when the world is about to be blown up because someone enters other waters. It's very, very complicated, the ownership of ancient artifacts. For example, in the UK, if I remember rightly, correct me if I'm wrong, the coast, all of the coastland of United Kingdom is actually owned by the monarchy, by the royal family, and anything found on it or whatever actually belongs to the royal family. It's their territory. I don't think it's just the beach. I think it's also a certain distance out from the coast. Maybe it's something like low tide, because obviously we have very big tides in the UK. I may have got that wrong, but it's something like that. The Titanic, look that up. Look at the problems with who owns that material, should you ever be to get down to it. Any other questions? They're really good questions. I'm just checking in case I've missed anything. I don't think I've missed anything. Well, thank you very much for listening, and we might do something else later in the year. Do take a look at the Sotheby's Institute Eventbrite site, because there's other lectures coming on. I know my, I think my colleague, Barbara Lasset, is going to do something about women as art patrons from Isabella d'Este of Mantua to Renaissance through to Peggy Guggenheim. So if any of my students are here, we're going to Venice Biennale. We have a very good relationship with the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, so do take a look at that lecture as well. Bosco, is there a bit of a paradox for provenance research not to be done so that their geographical origins, if contested, are not revealed in order to preserve cultural social? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It's such an interest in provenance issue, Bosco, these bronzes. They were certainly within Italian maritime legal jurisdiction. You know, they were found a certain number of meters offshore. That's okay. So the Italians will say that they're Italian, but as I say, an absolutist on an ethical level might say, well, if we think these were made in Greece, shouldn't they go back to Greece? And no one has ever suggested that, which is interesting. You know, if they were looted from ancient Greece to what, you know, this is all about historical relativism. It's a bit like the same arguments with the paths of marbles. They're such a long time ago. They were taken when Greece was Turkey. Many still think it was Turkey and that they were just trying, you know. So there's also, when we raise these questions, we raise a, you know, it's sticking your finger into a wasp's nest, to be honest. It's a great question. Any other questions? Really nice to see you all here on this. I don't know where you are in the world, but we've had some lovely weather over Christmas, although in the UK, London, although it's been very cold, we've had bright skies and today it's just miserable. It's just raining. Okay. I think we're probably, I think I've got everyone's, I think I've answered everyone's questions going back to the top. Yeah. Okay. So I think I'll end it there. Happy New Year to everybody.