Attic Red-Figure Kylix with the Sack of Troy

The object is a kylix, a wide, shallow, two-handled cup for drinking wine, of the type scholars class as Type C, and an unusually large example of it: one of the earliest preserved cups of this exact shape. It stands roughly 19 to 20.5 centimetres tall and spans 46.5 to 46.6 centimetres across, figures that come from two different published sources and are given here as a range rather than reconciled to a false precision.

It was made in Athens around 500 to 490 BC, thrown on the wheel by the potter Euphronios and decorated in the red-figure technique, in which the background is painted in a glossy black slip and the figures are left in the reserved colour of the clay, with internal detail added in dilute glaze and, originally, added colour now mostly lost. A cup this size is not a modest household object. Its scale and the density of its decoration mark it as a display piece, made for a symposium where the drinker would tip it back and find a mythological scene waiting in the bowl.

The tondo, the roundel at the centre of the interior, shows the killing of Priam. The old king sits on an altar, draped and white-haired; Neoptolemos approaches from the right in a black helmet and scaled armour, using the body of the child Astyanax as a weapon against him. A woman stands between them, and a fallen warrior lies half-hidden by the altar while Polyxena, nearby, wields an object resembling a pestle. This is the single most quoted image of the fall of Troy in Attic vase painting, and it sits at the centre of a cup meant to be drained to reveal it.

Around the tondo, in the surrounding zone, eight further scenes complete the night: the sons of Theseus, Akamas and Demophon, rescuing their grandmother Aithra; the lesser Ajax dragging Cassandra from the statue of the Palladion, an act of sacrilege inside a sanctuary; Menelaos confronting Helen, with Eros hovering between them; a Greek fighting two Trojans; a Greek warrior in an animal skin facing an old man and woman usually read as Antenor and Theano; and Stenelos attacking a woman armed with a pestle. Nine scenes in total decorate the single interior surface, a density of narrative that is itself part of the argument scholars make about the cup's meaning.

Dyfri Williams set out the first full account of this scheme in 1991, and Michael Anderson, writing in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1995, argued that the nine scenes are not simply a catalogue of sack-of-Troy incidents but a composition, arranged so that scenes of death, rescue and survival answer one another visually and thematically around the tondo. That is a scholarly argument, not a fact recovered from the object itself, and it is credited to the two named scholars who made it rather than presented as what Onesimos himself said he intended.

The outside of the cup carries a different moment in the story. One side shows Briseis being led away from Achilles's tent by Patroklos, with heralds following, among them Talthybios, and a scene of Thetis with Achilles; the other, more fragmentary, preserves part of a duel between Ajax and Hektor with Apollo intervening between them. Both belong not to the sack itself but to its causes and to the war that preceded it, the quarrel over Briseis that opens the Iliad and the single combats that punctuate it.

Read together with the interior, the cup moves from the causes of the Trojan War on the outside to its catastrophic end on the inside, a structure a drinker would experience in sequence: the wrath of Achilles on the surface, the fall of the city waiting inside the bowl.

Only one name is actually written on the cup. EUPHRONIOS EPOIESEN, Euphronios made it, is incised in the potting, which is why the potter attribution is treated as documented rather than argued: it rests on an autograph inscription, not on style. The painting carries no signature. It is given to Onesimos on the basis of connoisseurship, the comparison of drawing style, figure types and technical habits against a body of cups where Onesimos's hand is independently established, chiefly through Williams's 1991 study. The workshop relationship between the two men is itself inferred rather than documented: a number of surviving cups pair Euphronios's potter signature with painting attributed to Onesimos, which is the evidentiary basis for the common description of Onesimos as Euphronios's pupil.

It matters to be precise about which role Euphronios holds here, because this archive already holds a separate record for a different vessel connected to him, the Euphronios Krater, where he signed as painter rather than potter. The two objects are not versions of each other and do not share a provenance chain, an excavation context, or a restitution history. They share a name, a rough period, and, since 2015, a display case in the same Italian museum.

Under the foot, a second inscription was added later and by a different hand: a dedication to the god Hercle, the Etruscan Herakles, cut in the Caeretan alphabet used at ancient Caere, the city on whose territory modern Cerveteri stands. The archaeologist M. A. (Daniela) Rizzo drew attention to this inscription and argued that it points to the cup's presence, at some point after it reached Etruria, at a sanctuary dedicated to Hercle identified through excavation in the sacred area of Sant'Antonio at Cerveteri, where two temples dated to the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC have been documented.

That is an argued conclusion, credited to Rizzo, not a certainty. It describes a documented pattern in Etruscan religious practice, in which imported Athenian pottery entered sanctuaries as votive offerings rather than staying purely domestic. If Rizzo's reading is right, an Athenian drinking cup made for a symposium ended its ancient life as an offering to an Etruscan god, which is a change of function as significant as the change of hands. It is presented here as a finding about the cup's ancient afterlife, not as anything Onesimos or Euphronios could have intended when they made it in Athens.

The circumstances of the cup's exit from the ground are not documented with the precision of a formal excavation report; what survives is investigative reconstruction built after the fact. Multiple sources place the clandestine excavation in the Cerveteri area between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, ahead of the fragments' arrival on the market in 1983. No excavation permit, archaeologist's report, or find inventory for a specific tomb has surfaced in the sources consulted for this record.

Two different location clues exist and they do not obviously agree. Rizzo's argument from the Hercle inscription points to the sanctuary area of Sant'Antonio. Separately, a letter written by the Getty's own curator in 1992, discussed below, names Monte Abatone, a necropolis south of the ancient city, as the reported area of origin. A sanctuary and a necropolis are different kinds of site, and nothing in the sources fetched for this record resolves whether the cup passed through both, whether one report is simply wrong, or whether Monte Abatone and the Sant'Antonio sacred area were treated loosely as interchangeable shorthand for the general Cerveteri excavation zone by people who had reason not to be precise. That looseness is itself characteristic of looted material: the more exactly a findspot is known, the more it incriminates the people describing it.

The fragments reached the Getty through a chain built, on the evidence later assembled by Italian investigators, to obscure a single illegal excavation behind several unconnected-looking sales. The tondo fragment came from Frieda Tchacos-Nussberger's Galerie Nefer in Zurich, for which the Getty paid 180,000 dollars for pieces said to comprise around forty percent of the whole cup; Tchacos told the Getty she had bought them from Nino Savoca, a dealer in Munich. Other fragments were said to come from the S. Schweitzer collection of Arlesheim, an old Swiss collection name investigators came to regard as one of the standard fictions used to give a piece a documented-sounding history it did not have.

A further group of fragments was sold to the Getty in 1985 by the Hydra Gallery in Geneva, for around 100,000 dollars, on paperwork citing a 'Zbinden collection.' The Hydra Gallery, run by Christian Boursaud, is now understood by investigators to have functioned as a front for Giacomo Medici's trafficking network; Watson and Todeschini report that Boursaud's Hydra Gallery and the invented Zbinden name shared the same Sotheby's account number, a detail that, if accurate, is not consistent with two independent private collections and instead points to one operation using two names to make a single line of stolen fragments look like separate legitimate sources.

The Getty did not buy this cup once. It assembled it, paying for groups of fragments in at least 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1989 and recording them under separate accession numbers, principally 83.AE.362, with additional fragment groups accessioned as 84.AE.80 and 86.AE.385. Each purchase came with its own paper trail and, in several cases, its own fictional collection history, so that a single looted object was absorbed into the museum's holdings as what looked, on paper, like several small, unrelated acquisitions of European-market material.

The published scholarly catalogue of the assembled cup, Dyfri Williams's 'Onesimos and the Getty Iliupersis,' appeared in 1991 in a Getty Occasional Papers volume edited by Marion True herself, the museum's curator of antiquities. A letter from True to Medici, dated January 1992 and later recovered by investigators, reads in part: 'To know that they came from Cerveteri and the area of Monte Abatone is very helpful.' Watson and Todeschini, whose book prints the letter, treat it as evidence that True privately understood and recorded the Italian findspot years before the Getty's public position was tested. This record states that as a fact about a documented letter, not as a verdict on True's later criminal case, which concerned a different, wider body of acquisitions and reached no finding of guilt; that distinction is addressed on its own below.

On 13 September 1995, a joint Swiss-Italian operation raided storerooms registered to a company called Editions Services in the Geneva Freeport, the tax-free warehouse district near Geneva's airport. The raiding party combined a Swiss magistrate and police with officers from the Carabinieri's Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, Italy's specialist art-crime unit, then under the command of General Roberto Conforti. Behind an unremarkable warehouse door investigators found roughly 3,800 objects, whole or fragmentary, spread across about five rooms covering some 200 square metres, one of them fitted out as a restoration laboratory and another as a showroom for meeting clients. The storerooms belonged, the investigation established, to the dealer Giacomo Medici, who was arrested in January 1997.

What made the raid decisive was not primarily the objects but the paperwork: more than 4,000 photographs, most of them Polaroids, along with roughly 35,000 pages of business records. The document specialist Maurizio Pellegrini, working through the material, identified a recurring sequence in the photographs: an object shown dirty and broken, just out of the ground; the same object shown again mid-restoration; and, in some cases, a third image of the finished piece on display in a museum. Two Polaroid SX-70 cameras were recovered from the premises. Watson and Todeschini's account of the investigation states the underlying logic plainly: a Polaroid of a dirty, unprovenanced object is itself evidence that the object left the ground illegally, because no legitimate excavation documents a find with a Polaroid snapshot rather than a context record. Professional archaeologists did not use Polaroids for exactly this reason; people hiding an excavation did, because the film needed no outside laboratory and left no processing trail.

This is why the Medici archive was a different order of evidence from an ordinary gap in a museum's paperwork. A missing provenance record proves an absence. A Polaroid of a specific object, still caked in soil, in the private possession of a dealer later convicted of trafficking, proves a presence: that object was in that dealer's hands before it was clean, before it was whole, and before any museum owned it.

In October 1997, at the conference Antichita Senza Provenienza held at the University of Viterbo, the archaeologist Daniela Rizzo, of the Soprintendenza responsible for the Villa Giulia collections, presented evidence that this specific kylix had been illegally excavated from the Cerveteri area. Marion True was present. Rizzo addressed her directly and asked for the cup's return.

The evidence behind that request rested on the Geneva material. Among the seized Polaroids was a photograph of fragments matching this cup, still dirty, its margin annotated 'Prop. P.G.M.,' read by investigators as shorthand for 'proposed to the Paul Getty Museum,' an internal Medici-network note recording that these very pieces had been offered to the museum that went on to buy them. Investigators also matched the physical fracture edge of a fragment recovered through the investigation against the corresponding edge on the Getty's assembled cup, a join that does not depend on style or provenance paperwork at all: broken pieces of the same object fit together or they do not, and by the accounts consulted for this record, these did.

Marion True joined the Getty's antiquities department in 1982 and became its curator in 1986, a post she held until 2005. During her tenure she also wrote and implemented acquisition policies, in 1987 and again in 1995, intended to restrict the museum's purchase of undocumented or illegally exported antiquities, a record the sources consulted treat as genuine even though it sits uneasily beside the 1992 letter discussed above.

On 1 April 2005 an Italian court indicted True, together with the dealer Robert Hecht, on charges alleging a conspiracy to receive stolen antiquities and to launder their origin through fabricated collection histories; the indictment concerned a broad set of Getty acquisitions across her tenure, not this kylix alone, which the Getty had already returned six years earlier. True resigned from the Getty in September 2005, separately, over an undisclosed personal loan from a collector that the museum judged a conflict of interest. Her Italian trial opened on 16 November 2005 and ran without a verdict until 13 October 2010, when the court held that the statute of limitations on the alleged offences had expired; under Italian procedure that outcome leaves the accused neither convicted nor acquitted. A related Greek prosecution, over a gold funerary wreath, was separately dismissed on the same statute-of-limitations grounds in November 2007. Watson and Todeschini's book, and the Trafficking Culture project's case summaries, are the sources for these dates and outcomes; both are named here as the source of the claim, in keeping with the rule that an allegation against a named person is reported as what a named source states, not adopted as this record's own finding. This record's account of the kylix's return does not depend on, and is not a comment on, the outcome of that separate case.

The Getty returned the kylix to Italy on 5 February 1999, one of three objects handed back in that round of restitutions alongside a Roman-period head of Diadoumenos from the Fleischman collection and a torso identified as Mithra. Two months later, in April 1999, Medici himself surrendered three additional fragments of the cup that matched the pieces shown in the seized Polaroid, an act he described, in the account given by Watson and Todeschini, as done 'out of love for his country,' a claim this record repeats as his stated reasoning rather than an established motive.

Press coverage in the years since has referred in passing to further fragments returned in 2005 and to a fragment reportedly seized at Cerveteri in 2008. Neither claim could be confirmed against a primary document in the research for this record, and both are flagged rather than asserted; see the open questions and the editor's note below.

After its return the kylix went on display at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, where it remained from 1999 to 2014. In May 2014 it travelled to Cerveteri for a temporary exhibition, held from 8 May to 20 July at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale Cerite, timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the Banditaccia necropolis's inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The temporary loan became permanent the following year: in 2015 the kylix was transferred definitively to the Cerveteri museum, where it is displayed today in the Rocca Ruspoli, the town's thirteenth-century castle, alongside the Euphronios Krater, which reached the same museum by an entirely separate route.

The two objects now share a building, a fact that has done more than anything else to blur the two Euphronios cases in casual retelling. This record exists in part to keep them separate: same potter, different painter role, different findspot narrative, different trafficking chain, different return process, and, until 2015, different countries.

The Getty-Medici affair, of which this kylix's return is one early episode, is widely credited with pushing US museum acquisition practice toward due diligence standards that did not exist when the Getty bought these fragments in the 1980s. The sources consulted for this record describe a broader restitution wave following the Medici and True proceedings, including the Getty's own return of further contested pieces, such as the Aphrodite of Morgantina in 2011, and a general tightening of museum acquisition guidelines industry-wide. That wider history is described here in outline because it is well attested for the Getty as an institution; the sources consulted do not tie a specific post-1999 policy clause to this kylix by name, and this record does not claim they do.