# The Euphronios Krater > Euphronios - c. 515 BC; a late Archaic date of c. 510 BC is also published, and the Leagros kalos inscription places it in the range 520-510 BC > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/euphronios/euphronios-krater/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Euphronios - **Date:** c. 515 BC; a late Archaic date of c. 510 BC is also published, and the Leagros kalos inscription places it in the range 520-510 BC - **Medium:** Terracotta, Attic red-figure, with relief line and diluted slip - **Dimensions:** Height 45.7 cm; diameter 55.1 cm; capacity approximately 45 litres - **Object type:** Antiquity - **Period:** Late Archaic, 530-480 BC - **Current location:** Museo Archeologico Nazionale Cerite, Cerveteri, administered within the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary An Attic red-figure calyx-krater of about 515 BC, signed by Euxitheos as potter and by Euphronios as painter, showing the body of the Lycian prince Sarpedon lifted from the field of Troy by Sleep and Death while Hermes looks on. It is the only vase painted by Euphronios that survives complete, and by common consent one of the finest Greek vases in existence.It is also the most consequential provenance case in the history of the antiquities market. Dug out of an Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri in December 1971 by tomb robbers, it passed through Giacomo Medici to the dealer Robert Hecht and reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 at a record price for an antiquity, carrying a Beirut ownership story that had been lifted off a different vase. A New York Times reporter attacked the story within months. It took another thirty-five years, a raid on a Geneva freeport warehouse, four thousand seized Polaroids and a dealer's own handwritten memoir to finish the argument.The Metropolitan transferred title to Italy in February 2006 and handed the krater over in January 2008. It went first to Villa Giulia in Rome and then, in a decision that most accounts of the case still have not caught up with, to the small municipal museum at Cerveteri, four kilometres from the tomb it was taken from. The rules that now govern how American museums buy antiquities were written because of this pot. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 515 BC** Workshop of Euxitheos, Athens `[documented]` (origin) Thrown by Euxitheos and painted by Euphronios in the Athenian Kerameikos, both signing on the obverse. Euphronios is thought to have joined the Euxitheos workshop around 510 BC, and this vase is normally regarded as the peak of the partnership. The signatures are the documentation; there is no external record of the commission or the first owner. - **6th century BC-December 1971** Unknown; deposited in a tomb at Caere (Cerveteri) `[unknown]` (gap) Exported from Athens to Etruria in antiquity, as the great majority of surviving Attic figured pottery was, and buried as a grave good in the necropolis at Greppe Sant'Angelo. Nothing whatever is documented about the intervening twenty-five centuries: not the tomb's occupant, not the rest of the assemblage, not whether the chamber had been entered before. The ancient repairs on the vessel indicate it was used and mended before it went into the ground. - **December 1971-1971 or 1972** Tombaroli, then Giacomo Medici `[disputed]` (clandestine excavation and first sale) Italian court records place the illegal excavation in December 1971 at Greppe Sant'Angelo, on private land. The diggers are reported to have sold the krater to the dealer Giacomo Medici for something in the region of 88,000 dollars. In February 1973 one of the group, Armando Cenere, told the New York Times he had acted as lookout and had been shown a fragment painted with a bleeding man, which corresponds to the Sarpedon figure and its three wounds. The 88,000 figure is a reported one and the currency in which it was actually paid is not established here. Medici contested the case throughout. - **1971 or 1972-August 1972** Robert E. Hecht `[disputed]` (sale into the trade) Medici is reported to have smuggled the vase into Switzerland and sold it to the American dealer Robert E. Hecht for around 350,000 dollars. Hecht had it restored in Zurich by Fritz Buerki before offering it to the Metropolitan. Hecht denied this account for thirty years. The handwritten memoir seized from his Paris apartment on 16 February 2001 contains two accounts of the acquisition, one naming Medici and a 1971 illegal excavation, one repeating the Sarrafian story. Graded disputed because the two versions are both in Hecht's own hand and no court ever adjudicated between them: his trial ended without a verdict on 16 January 2012 when the limitation period expired. - **1920 (claimed)-1972 (claimed)** Dikran Sarrafian and family, Beirut (claimed) `[disputed]` (asserted prior ownership, not accepted) The provenance offered to the Metropolitan at the time of purchase. Hecht said he was acting on ten per cent commission for the Lebanese dealer Dikran Sarrafian, whose father had bought the vase in London in 1920. Sarrafian supplied letters dated 10 July 1971 and 9 September 1972. The Metropolitan's own defensive investigation after the 1973 press attacks produced a record of 909,000 dollars paid to Sarrafian in Swiss francs on 25 October 1971, before the alleged December excavation, plus affidavits from the restorer Buerki, a Basel photographer and the collector Muriel Newman. The story failed on its own terms: Sarrafian repeatedly described what he owned as a hatbox of fragments, and the Metropolitan's vase is intact and far too large. By 1993 Hoving had concluded that Hecht had transferred the documents of a genuine but fragmentary Sarrafian krater onto this one. That second, poorer krater surfaced with Nelson Bunker Hunt, was acquired by Leon Levy and Shelby White in 1990, and was returned to Italy in 2010. Sarrafian died in a car crash in 1977 and was never questioned. - **August 1972-February 2006** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (purchase) Hecht notified curator Dietrich von Bothmer of the vase in February 1972; von Bothmer, director Thomas Hoving and deputy director Theodore Rousseau inspected it in Zurich in June; the museum agreed to buy in August 1972 and the krater reached the United States on 31 August. Accession 1972.11.10. The price is reported both as one million dollars, a record for any antiquity, and as 1.2 million dollars with a date of 10 November 1972; that date is identical in form to the accession number, which this record flags rather than resolves. It was a private treaty sale, so there is no hammer and no premium. The museum funded the purchase by deaccessioning its coin collection through Sotheby's, realising close to 2.3 million dollars. - **February 2006-January 2008** The Italian Republic; on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art `[documented]` (transfer of title) Agreement announced 3 February 2006 and signed in Rome on 21 February 2006 by Philippe de Montebello and the Italian culture minister Rocco Buttiglione. Title to twenty antiquities passed to Italy, the krater and the Morgantina silver among them. Italy waived civil and criminal action against the museum over the restituted pieces and undertook a forty-year cooperation programme including rotating four-year loans of objects of equivalent quality. The krater remained physically in New York under loan number L.2006.10 until after the museum's new Greek and Roman galleries opened. De Montebello, who had opened negotiations demanding incontrovertible evidence, stated that it was highly probable the vase had been taken from an Etruscan tomb. - **January 2008-December 2014** Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome `[documented]` (repatriation and display) The krater arrived in Italy and was unveiled in Rome on 18 January 2008, joining the exhibition Nostoi. Capolavori ritrovati at the Palazzo del Quirinale, which ran from 21 December 2007 to 24 March 2008 with sixty-seven to sixty-eight recovered objects from American museums and private collectors. It was then displayed at Villa Giulia, described in contemporary reporting as its permanent home. - **December 2014-present** Museo Archeologico Nazionale Cerite, Cerveteri `[documented]` (definitive transfer) Sent to Cerveteri in December 2014 for a temporary display marking ten years of UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Banditaccia necropolis. Visitor numbers at the museum rose about seventy-five per cent; 23,075 visitors in the first nine months of 2015 against 22,164 for the whole of 2014. On 7 November 2015 the Ministry of Culture announced that the regional museum directorate for Lazio had signed the act definitively transferring the krater and the Euphronios kylix from Villa Giulia to Cerveteri. No 2026 primary confirmation of display status was obtained for this record. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **1972-08** Robert E. Hecht, antiquities dealer, sold privately to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Private dealer purchase, not an auction - Estimate: Not applicable - Hammer: Not applicable; no auction took place - With premium: USD 1,000,000 by one account, USD 1,200,000 by another; the two published figures are not reconciled in the sources consulted (see note) - This was a private purchase from a dealer, not an auction result. The Metropolitan agreed to buy the krater from Hecht in August 1972, after negotiations conducted by director Thomas Hoving, curator of Greek and Roman art Dietrich von Bothmer, and deputy director Theodore Rousseau, who had viewed the piece in Zurich that June; the museum's own accession number, 1972.11.10, records formal accession in November. Two purchase figures are in circulation and neither this record nor its sources reconciles them. USD 1,000,000 appears in Neil Brodie's Trafficking Culture case study, citing Thomas Hoving's own 2001 account of the negotiation, and is repeated in Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini's book The Medici Conspiracy, where it is described as the figure most associated with the sale. USD 1,200,000 appears in the Wikipedia entry for the krater, sourced there to New York magazine of 7 December 1981, and in the University of Geneva Art-Law Centre's ArThemis case note on the Italy-Metropolitan dispute. The price was not disclosed at the time of sale; it became public only when reporter Nicholas Gage named a figure in the New York Times of 19 February 1973, which set off the provenance controversy recorded elsewhere in this record. The museum did not pay cash outright: it funded the purchase by consigning its Ward and Durkee collections of ancient coins and medals to Sotheby Parke Bernet, which advanced 1.5 million dollars against the sale and ultimately returned the museum close to 2.3 million dollars in total proceeds. This transaction predates the krater's 2008 return to Italy, which is recorded in the provenance chain above; this row records only what was paid to acquire it, not what it was later found to be worth returning. ## Exhibitions - Ispirazioni. Vite italiane dell arte greca, Acropolis Museum, Athens (touring to Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, Oct-Dec 2026), 2026 ## Open questions - Was the purchase price one million dollars or 1.2 million, and on what date did title actually pass? The widely repeated date of 10 November 1972 is identical in form to the museum's accession number 1972.11.10, which is a coincidence that ought to be checked against the Metropolitan's own acquisition minutes before either figure is repeated again. - Which tomb at Greppe Sant'Angelo, and what else was in it? No plan, no assemblage record and no skeletal evidence exist, so the archaeological context of the single most famous Greek vase is permanently lost. The number of people buried, the date of the burial and whether other vessels left the chamber at the same time are all unknown. - Did a genuine second, fragmentary Sarrafian krater exist, and is the object returned to Italy in 2010 from the Levy-White collection the same vessel? Hoving asserted the identification in 1993; no independent confirmation was located for this record. - Was Dietrich von Bothmer shown the location of the looted tomb on an aerial photograph? Marion True testified under oath in June 2001 that he was; von Bothmer denied it; neither account was tested at trial. - What did Italy actually lend the Metropolitan in exchange, and is the rotating four-year loan programme agreed in 2006 still running in 2026? The forty-year cooperation term runs to 2046 and its performance appears never to have been publicly audited. - Where are the Medici Polaroids now and will they be opened? Roughly 4,000 images plus the later Becchina and Symes-Michaelides seizures, possibly more than 100,000 items in total, are held in Rome and released only through a small number of authorised researchers. Medici asserts copyright in his own photographs. - Is the krater still on display at Cerveteri as of 2026? The last primary confirmation located is the ministerial act announced on 7 November 2015. No current Italian inventory number for the object was found. ## Sources - [1] Neil Brodie, 'Euphronios (Sarpedon) Krater', Trafficking Culture encyclopedia, University of Glasgow. Primary secondary source for the looting, the dealer chain, prices, the Sarrafian letters, the Metropolitan's 1973 defensive investigation and the 2006 agreement. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Euphronios Krater'. TERTIARY. Used for the physical description, the iconographic reading, the kalos dating argument and the Villa Giulia to Cerveteri move. Flagged for replacement with the Berlin 1991 exhibition catalogue Euphronios. Der Maler and with Nigel Spivey's monograph on the vase. - [3] ArThemis case note, 'Euphronios Krater and Other Archaeological Objects - Italy and Metropolitan Museum of Art', Art-Law Centre, University of Geneva. Used for the terms of the 2006 agreement, the Italian statutory basis and the negotiation chronology. - [4] The Art Newspaper, 'Metropolitan to return antiquities to Italy', 1 March 2006. Used for the signing date and place, the signatories and the object count. - [5] Neil Brodie, 'Giacomo Medici', Trafficking Culture encyclopedia. Used for the Geneva Freeport raid of 13 September 1995, the contents of the storerooms, Editions Services, and the conviction and appeal record. - [6] Ministero della Cultura, press release of 7 November 2015, 'Franceschini, il cratere di Eufronio restera a Cerveteri'. PRIMARY. The ministerial announcement of the definitive transfer, with the visitor figures. - [7] Wikimedia Commons, catalogue description by ArchaiOptix accompanying photographs of the krater at Cerveteri. Used for the full inscription readings, both signatures, the findspot, the Beazley Archive Pottery Database number 187, the former Metropolitan accession and loan numbers, and the Berlin 1991 catalogue reference. - [8] Wikipedia, 'Euphronios'. TERTIARY. Used for the artist dossier: training, the Pioneer Group, technical innovations, the 1838 signature identification, Beazley and Morelli, the shift to potting, the Acropolis votive base, and the workshop painters. Flagged for replacement with Euphronios und seine Zeit (Berlin 1992) and Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edn 1963. - [9] Association of Art Museum Directors, 'New Acquisitions of Archaeological Material and Works of Ancient Art', guidelines effective 4 June 2008 and the AAMD Object Registry. PRIMARY for the 1970 threshold and the publication requirement. - [10] Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, The Medici Conspiracy, epilogue 'On Fifth Avenue'. Used for de Montebello's shift of evidentiary standard and his quoted remarks, and for Hoving's recorded reaction to the Sarrafian invoice. - [11] Center for Art Law, 'Italian Trial of Robert Hecht Concludes with No Verdict', 23 January 2012. Used for the trial outcome of 16 January 2012, the limitation ruling, Hecht's age and prosecutor Paolo Ferri's comment. - [12] Ministero della Cultura, 'Nostoi. Capolavori ritrovati in mostra al Quirinale'. PRIMARY. Used for the exhibition dates, venue, object count, inaugurators and attendance. - [13] Wikipedia, 'National Archaeological Museum of Cerveteri'. TERTIARY. Used for the museum's Italian name, its location in the Ruspoli castle, its 1967 foundation and its administration. Flagged for replacement with the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia's own catalogue. - [14] ANSA, 'Euphronios kylix on show after return from Getty', 8 May 2014. Used for the kylix: Euphronios as potter, Onesimos as painter, the 1983-1985 looting at Cerveteri, the Getty's 1999 return and the 2014 Cerveteri display. - [15] The Art Newspaper, 'Calls to open looted-art archives grow louder', 2 June 2015. Used for the current status of the Medici, Becchina and Symes-Michaelides archives, their inaccessibility, and the AAMD's request that they be opened. - [16] Italy Magazine, 'Euphronios chalice gets permanent home'. Used only as evidence of the state of the record before 2014, when Villa Giulia was reported as the krater's permanent home. Retained deliberately to show what the outdated version of this story looks like. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Euthymides'. TERTIARY. Used for the Revellers Vase inscription hos oudepote Euphronios, its Greek text and the competing scholarly readings by Gisela Richter and others. Flagged for replacement with the Munich Corpus Vasorum entry. - [18] AgenziaCult, 'Arte, Italia e Grecia insieme: all'Acropoli 38 capolavori dai musei italiani', 10 June 2026. Used for the 2026 loan: the exhibition Ispirazioni. Vite italiane dell'arte greca at the Acropolis Museum, Athens, 15 June to 30 August 2026, 38 works, the krater named among them as il Cratere di Eufronio da Cerveteri, and the second leg at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria from October to December 2026. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.