Met Returns Looted Bronze Griffin Head to Greece
154Feb. 26, 2025
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on February 24returnedto Greece an ancient bronze griffin head thought to have been pilfered from a museum in Olympia in the 1930s. Dating to the seventh century BCE, the artifact was originally discovered in a riverbed in Greece’s Peloponnese region in 1914 by a curator at the Archaeological Museum of Olympia. Following its disappearance from that institution, it was purchased in 1948 from a New York dealer by financier and Met trustee Walter C. Baker, who bequeathed it to the Met. The treasure entered the museum’s collection in 1972 and beginning in 1999 graced the entrance to the institution’s Greek and Roman galleries.
The Met in the past two years has stepped up its commitment to provenance research, last yearappointingSotheby’s veteran Lucian Simmons as its inaugural provenance research chief. TheNew York Timesreports that this is the first antiquity to be repatriated under Simmons’s watch, though conversations about the return began in 2018. The Met in a statement revealed that research by the institution and by Greek officials showed the griffin head to have been stolen.
“The Met and the Greek ministry agreed to the return of the Griffin after careful review of records and letters determining that it could not have legitimately left the Archaeological Museum of Olympia,” the museum said in the statement. “This research revealed that the theft of the object occurred under the watch of the head of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, for which he was referred for criminal prosecution over eighty years ago.”
Greece will loan the griffin head back to the Met next year for an exhibition.
“The Met is honored to collaborate with the Hellenic Republic on the return of this extraordinary object,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein told the Times. “We are grateful for our long-standing partnership with the Greek government and look forward to continued engagement and opportunities for cultural exchange.”