Image Details

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, Gift of Darius Odgen Mills and gift of C. Ruxton Love, by exchange, 1972.

“The drawing is equal to Leonardo’s … The drama is as intense as the greatest Rembrandt,” writes Thomas Hoving, a former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, of the late sixth-century B.C. red-figured Greek urn opposite. Painted by the great vase-painter Euphronios, the scene on the vase shows the death of a Lycian prince killed in the Trojan war. The Euphronios vase sparked controversy almost as soon as the Met purchased it nearly 30 years ago. Unknown to Met officials, the antiquities dealer who brokered the transaction between the sellers and the museum had deliberately substituted the papers of another—legally excavated—Euphronios urn for the Met’s urn, which had actually been looted from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri. Italian authorities continue to insist that the Met return the vase, but the Met responds that it bought the vase legally and in good faith—and so the object belongs to the museum.