Interviews
Wall Street Journal: A Celebrity in Low-Key Digs
Link: WSJ on The Lost Chalice
Mr. Silver, chronicler of the criminals, curators, detectives and politicians who have chased after the bowl in recent decades, insists that their story too is now an essential part of the krater’s significance, and thus an important element in the way the museum should present it. “Objects accrue meanings over time,” he says. “People may go to jail today because of this 2,500-year-old pot. Reputations have been won and lost because of it. To label it as just a work of art would be a mistake.”
NPR: Italy Cracks Down on Raiders of Lost Art
Link: NPR: Italy Cracks Down on Raiders of Lost Art
NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports: “The expert who helped nail down the exact spot where the pot was found is Vernon Silver, an American journalist with a degree in archaeology from Oxford. His new book, The Lost Chalice, traces the story of the looted vase’s travels from a tomb in Italy to Switzerland to New York and back to Italy through the labyrinthine world of smugglers and shady dealers in an illicit trade that fed a network of American collectors and institutions.”
The New York Times: A Greek Urn’s Underworld
Link: Stolen Beauty: A Greek Urn’s Underworld
“The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece,” just published by William Morrow, makes a first-class page turner out of the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here — and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios, a kylix, or chalice, which was looted from the same spot here in Cerveteri, a town northwest of Rome.
Vernon Silver, a 40-year-old American journalist and a doctoral student in archaeology at Oxford, wrote the book. “This is the whole illicit antiquities trade writ small,” he said a few days ago. “The two works started out in the hands of the same Greek artist, 2,500 years ago, ended up going through the same shady Italian dealer by different routes to America, one the public route, the other underground, and both end up back here in Italy.”
The tale is one neither Met officials nor Italian authorities will be pleased to find so conscientiously recounted.