Fodor's Expert Review Aidone and the Goddesses
A vast archaeological site in a remote location, Morgantina long provided rich pickings for illegal excavators: when Italian detectives raided an 18th-century villa in Enna belonging to a Sicilian art dealer, they discovered more than 30,000 ancient artifacts, most of them plundered from Morgantina. In 1986, American archaeologist Malcolm Bell, director of the University of Princeton’s excavations at Morgantina, established that the heads, hands, and feet of 6th-century BC Greek statues of goddesses from a private collection exhibited at the Getty museum outside of Los Angeles also derived from Morgantina. Identified as Demeter and Persephone, the statues were acroliths, with wooden bodies (long rotted away) and marble extremities. Returned to Sicily in 2009 after a lengthy legal battle, they are currently displayed at a small museum in the village of Aidone, beautifully lit and hauntingly "dressed" by Sicilian fashion designer Marella Ferrara.
Equally... READ MORE
A vast archaeological site in a remote location, Morgantina long provided rich pickings for illegal excavators: when Italian detectives raided an 18th-century villa in Enna belonging to a Sicilian art dealer, they discovered more than 30,000 ancient artifacts, most of them plundered from Morgantina. In 1986, American archaeologist Malcolm Bell, director of the University of Princeton’s excavations at Morgantina, established that the heads, hands, and feet of 6th-century BC Greek statues of goddesses from a private collection exhibited at the Getty museum outside of Los Angeles also derived from Morgantina. Identified as Demeter and Persephone, the statues were acroliths, with wooden bodies (long rotted away) and marble extremities. Returned to Sicily in 2009 after a lengthy legal battle, they are currently displayed at a small museum in the village of Aidone, beautifully lit and hauntingly "dressed" by Sicilian fashion designer Marella Ferrara.
Equally powerful is the so-called Aphrodite Getty, or Venus of Malibu, bought by the Getty in 1987 for $18 million on the basis of provenance documents that were later proved to have been forgeries. Returned to Sicily in 2011, the hefty maturity of her body, revealed by wind-blown drapery, has led most scholars to identify her as the Mother Goddess Demeter. Other objects returned from the Getty include the Eupolmos Silver, a set of ritual dining ware, and a head of Hades, identified as belonging to Morgantina when a student working in the site archives discovered a terra-cotta curl of blue-tinted "hair" and suspected that it belonged to a head on display in the Getty. When the curl was sent to the museum, it was found to be a perfect fit, and in 2016 the head was returned to Sicily.
READ LESS
