Thanks. I didn’t know all that. While I agree, national treasures should stay in their respective countries, since everyone signed off on the bust then it was Borchardt’s to do with what he wished. If the french savant or whomever wasn’t smart enough to do his job and properly identify the object, then that’s not Borchardt’s fault. Ah, well.
Even that raises some questions. Every several years, I re-read King of the Confessors by Thomas Hoving, former Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a fascinating, almost Indiana Jones-esque story of Hoving's pursuit of the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, an ivory medieval masterpiece. This year, I also read Hoving's Making the Mummies Dance, Fakebusters, and Tutankhamun, The Untold Story in sequence.
I finished Tutankhamun today.
There are immense amounts in those books about the legal export and smuggling of antiquities and art.
The concept of 'national treasures' raises these issues. Who decides if it's a 'national treasure'? At what point does something buried or standing on private land become owned by the nation and not the landowner? Many of Italy's great treasures were above-ground for, what?, 1800 years or more, until a market developed for them? And they were only considered a national treasure at that point?
If a 'national treasure' is found on private land, is the landowner compensated and, if so, at the true value of the piece or at what value? What if the national treasure is an antiquity that was created in another country but seized as the spoils of war thousands of years ago? In that case, is the piece a national treasure of the country where it was created, or the country where it has been for the last two thousand years?
If the piece is in one country but clearly originated in another country, how does one know if it was the spoils of war, or purchased legally 2,500 or 1,000 years ago?