Venere di Morgantina

Carved around 420 BC and looted from Morgantina in the 1970s, this life-size goddess passed through Swiss dealers to the J. Paul Getty Museum before Italy won her return. Since 2011 she has stood in the Archaeological Museum of Aidone, honoured today as Demeter or Kore rather than Venus.

Why it matters

The statue known as the Venere di Morgantina is a marble-and-limestone cult figure of about 420 BC, roughly 2.20 metres tall, whose face, arms and feet are carved in Parian marble while the drapery is worked in local limestone, the pseudo-acrolithic technique of wealthy Sicilian sanctuaries. Traces of red, blue and pink pigment still survive on her. Her importance is twofold. As art, she is a commanding example of the rich style, made by a sculptor of the school associated with Phidias, and the regional analysis connects her stone to the Iblean hill country near Morgantina. As a case study, her biography from clandestine excavation to auction house to forced repatriation helped reshape how the world's museums handle unprovenanced antiquities. She is the single object around which the Aidone museum's story turns.

What to notice

The carving contrasts the limestone folds of the chiton, coloured in antiquity, with the marble of the exposed skin. The statue is finished on all four sides, and the regional account notes she was set up in an interior whose exact location at Morgantina is still unidentified. Her pose and veiled, matronly build argue against the Apollo-like glamour of an Aphrodite and fit a grain goddess, which is why the official museum catalogue names her neutrally as an image of a goddess, read today as Demeter or Kore. Sixth-century BC acroliths of Demeter and Kore in an adjoining room show the same technique two centuries earlier.

Context and history

Clandestine diggers stripped parts of Morgantina in the late 1970s, and by the early 1980s the statue had surfaced in Switzerland, where the dealer Renzo Canavesi sold it to Robin Symes in 1986. The J. Paul Getty Museum bought it in 1988 for a record eighteen million dollars and exhibited it as an Aphrodite. Italian authorities pressed the case for two decades; a Getty-convened scientific workshop on 9 May 2007 concluded that the statue was most likely illegally excavated from, or close to, Morgantina, and later that year an agreement between the Getty Trust and the Italian culture ministry settled her transfer, with technical collaboration and an anti-seismic base included. The statue remained on display at the Getty until the end of 2010 and returned to Italy in 2011. It was reassembled in Aidone in March that year and became a central work in the museum. Her fame has drawn new attention to the town and its ancient city, and she shares the galleries with the repatriated Morgantina silver.