«According to the Paul Getty Foundation, the Athlete of Fano does not belong to the Italian cultural heritage, it would have been produced by a Greek workshop, it would have been exhibited in a large sanctuary raided by the Romans and, in this case, it would be today’s Greece that could request the return of the statue. But if on the one hand a contemporary principle cannot be applied to the ancient world, on the other there is no evidence in favor of exposure to or provenance from a Greek territory. And that Greek workshop could have been based in Italy”.
They are the words of Rachele Dubbini, professor of classical archeology at the University of Ferrara. The scholar speaks with full knowledge of the facts: it’s her the author from the report commissioned by the Ministry of Culture with which our country defended itself in the face of European Court of Human Rights of Strasbourg the right to confiscate the magnificent bronze attributed by some scholars to Lysippus. The Court unanimously rejected Getty’s appeal for violation of the protection of property: the Athlete caught in the Adriatic off the coast of the Marche region, landed in Fano in 1964, and transited through our territory without notifying the authorities must be returned to Italy, purchased by the Getty in 1977, preserved in the Getty Villa in Malibu, California. The Californian institute no longer has any alternatives. In November 2018 the Court of Cassation confirmed the correctness of the confiscation issued by Court of Pesaro on the basis of what is documented by the Ministry and the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.
Anconetana of 1979, Rachele Dubbini among other things, she is co-editor of the volume with Jessica Clementi and Mariateresa Curcio An athlete who came from the sea. Critical issues and prospects for a return (220 pp., L’Erma di Bretschneider, Rome 2023, €72). At the «Giornale dell’Arte» he summarizes the report with which the lawyer Lorenzo Dassa was able to win this legal battle for the department directed by Gennaro Sangiuliano.
Dubbini, how did you argue your report in response to the US Foundation?
As I was saying, there are no indications that the Athlete was exposed on Greek territory. Nor do we have any idea what wreck it was probably in. Maybe it wasn’t even a wreck. It may also be that it was exhibited in a Marche context: the closest Greek city to the discovery is Ancona. No evidence supports that it had been part of the ancient Greek heritage instead of the Roman one. Nor is it correct to apply contemporary principles to the ancient world, especially from the Hellenistic era when the whole Mediterranean was Greek, Greek culture was “koiné”. The bronze may also have been produced by a Micro-Asian workshop.
It is worth underlining what he said: today’s principles cannot be applied to the ancient ones.
No, you can’t. Furthermore, that model, with an archetype that we do not know, was also used by Roman culture. The statue is a copy of a very famous model throughout the Mediterranean and of various examples used for different purposes. At the Bardo Museum in Tunis there is a bronze statue, found in a wreck, closely similar to the Athlete of Fano: that model was used as an eros, wings were applied to him and the proportions were modified so that he was a child and not a very young one like our sculpture. That world was much more fluid than we understand today.
Why do you think the argument of origin from Greece is unfounded?
First of all, the Getty on appeal proposed a cultural theme, not a legal argument, albeit an inconsistent one. In fact, Greece did not request the sculpture. Like other territories, the Greek one was raided by the Romans, we cannot apply today’s legislation at that time. And no one can exclude that it was located in the mid-Adriatic area: in the Marche area there were sanctuaries such as the very famous one in Cupra Marittima.
Few Greek bronzes have reached us.
When we find them we shout about originality, while in the Hellenistic era many copies were made for different uses. The fact that the Athlete is slightly smaller than life size makes me think that it was created for a private, not public, context. A wealthy person, even a Roman one, could have purchased the statue for his domus or commissioned it from a workshop in Italy with Greek artisans: we have many examples. These are hypotheses, I’m not stating it, I’m saying that we have no elements to exclude it.
