The discovery in the archives of the Penn Museum of Philadelphia of two old photographs, with hand-written notes, depicting three unpublished contexts of Faliscan materials, untraceable in the museum’s collections, triggered a search of materials between the two coasts of the American continent. The recognition of some Attic and Faliscan red-figure vases dating to the first half of the 4th century portrayed in one of these shots has in fact led the trail to the Phoebe H. Museum in Berkeley, where these specimens are preserved: if in the museum’s warehouses the discovery of all the vases has allowed the reconstruction of the entire tomb-groups (for two of which a provenance from Narce is highly probable), thus allowing to contextualize one of the major red-figure Faliscan ceramic groups in American collections, the archives returned the documentation relating to the acquisition of the materials by the museum (1902). These objects arrived in Philadelphia through the same channels that led to the creation of collections of Faliscan materials preserved in Philadelphia and Chicago. The recognition of the handwriting of Giuseppe Ficola in the captions of the photographs has, in fact, also made it possible for these materials to reconstruct the same export dynamics through the consolidated triangle Francesco Mancinelli Scotti/ Giuseppe Ficola, Arthur Frothingham (Princeton University) and Sara Yorke Stevenson (Philadelphia Museum). From Pennsylvania, the materials then arrived in California thanks to Ms Phoebe Hearst, who had provided the funds for their purchase, and who from 1987 held the position of Regent of the University of California. The materials thus became one of the first groups of the newly established Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. In addition to presenting the discovery of important unpublished contexts, the proposed work, therefore, has the aim of helping to clarify the late 19th-century relationships between Italian excavators/art dealers, intermediaries and important American buyers. It is therefore hoped that this work will contribute to further clarify the dynamics and the protagonists of that archaeological market which nourished the fire of the American interest in Italic antiquities, responsible for the creation of the largest overseas Etruscan collections but which soon became extinct, leaving behind, more than a century after their discovery, important groups of materials still unpublished and difficult to contextualize.
A. Pola, Coast to coast. Da Philadelphia a Berkeley. Alcune tombe falische al P. A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, in M.C. Biella-J. Tabolli, Lo strano caso di Francesco Mancinelli Scotti, Milano 2021, pp. 514-586.
Angela Pola
2021-01-01
Abstract
The discovery in the archives of the Penn Museum of Philadelphia of two old photographs, with hand-written notes, depicting three unpublished contexts of Faliscan materials, untraceable in the museum’s collections, triggered a search of materials between the two coasts of the American continent. The recognition of some Attic and Faliscan red-figure vases dating to the first half of the 4th century portrayed in one of these shots has in fact led the trail to the Phoebe H. Museum in Berkeley, where these specimens are preserved: if in the museum’s warehouses the discovery of all the vases has allowed the reconstruction of the entire tomb-groups (for two of which a provenance from Narce is highly probable), thus allowing to contextualize one of the major red-figure Faliscan ceramic groups in American collections, the archives returned the documentation relating to the acquisition of the materials by the museum (1902). These objects arrived in Philadelphia through the same channels that led to the creation of collections of Faliscan materials preserved in Philadelphia and Chicago. The recognition of the handwriting of Giuseppe Ficola in the captions of the photographs has, in fact, also made it possible for these materials to reconstruct the same export dynamics through the consolidated triangle Francesco Mancinelli Scotti/ Giuseppe Ficola, Arthur Frothingham (Princeton University) and Sara Yorke Stevenson (Philadelphia Museum). From Pennsylvania, the materials then arrived in California thanks to Ms Phoebe Hearst, who had provided the funds for their purchase, and who from 1987 held the position of Regent of the University of California. The materials thus became one of the first groups of the newly established Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. In addition to presenting the discovery of important unpublished contexts, the proposed work, therefore, has the aim of helping to clarify the late 19th-century relationships between Italian excavators/art dealers, intermediaries and important American buyers. It is therefore hoped that this work will contribute to further clarify the dynamics and the protagonists of that archaeological market which nourished the fire of the American interest in Italic antiquities, responsible for the creation of the largest overseas Etruscan collections but which soon became extinct, leaving behind, more than a century after their discovery, important groups of materials still unpublished and difficult to contextualize.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
