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Spain captures bronze toddlers capturing partridges
An extraordinary pair of Roman bronzes depicting toddler girls diving to capture a partridge have been repatriated to Spain after a long sojourn through the underworld of looting, smuggling, forged documents, high-profile auction sales, even higher-profile museum loans and an acute case of no-honor-among-thieves blowing up in their faces.
Dating to the 1st-2nd century A.D., the bronzes are about 20 inches long and mounted to rectangular bases. They capture the little girls in dynamic movement, frozen in the act of propelling themselves forward, their fingers splayed wide on each side of the partridges just about to catch them. The craftsmanship is superior, every detail on the toddlers and partridges realistically depicted with fine materials. The eyes are inlaid with white stones and one of the girls still has her metal irises. They have eye lashes made of sheet bronze. Their gowns are delicately draped and sweep backwards conveying the girls dashing ahead. The partridges are beautifully detailed as well, each individual feather delineated.
Surviving Roman bronze sculptural groups, especially a matched set of exceptional craftsmanship complete with their original inlays and bases, are exceedingly rare. While genre statues featuring young children playing, often with pets or birds, were popular decorative objects in the homes of wealthy Romans, this particular motif of girls chasing partridges is very uncommon.
The pair were much-publicized highlights of Christie’s Antiquities Sale in New York on December 5, 2012. Not only were they spectacular in quality and conservation, but they came with a documented history of ownership by famed Swiss collector, Giovanni Züst, who had, the records claimed, sold it to the family of the current owners in the 1960s. The Züst connection gave it an air of respectability, despite the “Swiss private collection” fig leaf having been the stock in trade of every looted artifact in the illegal trade for decades.
The pair sold to a private collector who two years later loaned the bronzes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were still on display there nine years later when the skein of lies began to unravel thanks to a double-cross between the thieves that ended up in a lawsuit. Charges of fraud and embezzlement against two men, a 51-year-old Swiss national and an 80-year-old Italian living in Switzerland were dropped due to lack of evidence, but they both lied a lot in the process of trying to cover their asses, and the investigation exposed the truth. Some of it, anyway.
According to the plaintiff in the lawsuit, the bronzes were found by his grandfather on their ancestral land in Spain. The Swiss defendant said they’d been in his family for generations. Both stories were false. The first real evidence of the statues are photographs taken in 2006 or 2007 at the plaintiff’s house in Spain. The bronzes were in poor condition in these pictures, indicating that they had been recently unearthed, likely from an unknown archaeological site near the home in southern Spain.
The Italian man, who had a long history of involvement in looted artifacts, was engaged to restore them. The bronzes traveled to London and Switzerland, got laundered and picked up some forged ownership records before making their way to Christie’s in New York. The plaintiff in the lawsuit was supposed to get a cut of the $1.5 million sale to Christie’s, but he was shut out by his Swiss and Italian conspirators, so he waited until the statute of limitations on the fraud ran out, and in 2018, filed suit against the two men who had not given him his piece of the proceeds of their illegal scheme. Of course he had a cover story to pretend it wasn’t all a bunch of looters bickering, but so did the other two and none of the passed the smell test. The private prosecutor called them all out for being full of it, and the case was dropped in 2023.
By then, however, the Spanish police, cultural heritage authorities, customs and the National Archaeological Museum were investigating the bronzes and the real evidence of the 2006-7 photographs proved that the Züst provenance was fraudulent. The private collector voluntarily surrendered the statues and last month, the toddlers were officially handed over to the National Archaeological Museum in Spain
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