On 21 September 2026, the Metropolitan Museum of Art made public the restitution of eight objects to Greece. The ceremony was held at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, not at the museum, with the Greek Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, and Cate Dillon, United States Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Three of the works are a Hellenistic pendant in the shape of an amphora, made of gold and garnet; a Middle Bronze Age terracotta beak-spouted jug; and a Roman marble head of a veiled man. According to the Met's statement, the restitution was supported by new information arising from the District Attorney's investigations and the museum's own provenance research into works acquired through investigated dealers.
The statement does not identify these dealers. The individual records for the works do publish part of their provenance: the pendant was acquired in 2000 from Galerie Nefer, having previously belonged to Frieda Tchacos-Nussberger and Werner Nussberger; the marble head was purchased in 1991 from Robert Haber and Artemis Fine Arts; and the jug entered the collection as a gift from Peter Sharrer, who had acquired it at Sotheby’s in December 1994. These details make it possible to reconstruct the immediate routes by which the works entered the collection, but they do not in themselves show to whom the statement refers when it speaks of “investigated dealers”. Nor do they explain what new information the District Attorney’s Office provided in each case.
The records also note that the pendant was returned in February 2026 and that the jug and the head were returned in June. 21 September was the date of the public ceremony at which their return was presented alongside the other pieces; it was not the moment at which the three formally left the collection.
The other five items are two helmets and three mitrai, bronze guards for the lower torso, dating from the late seventh century BC. They are linked to Afrati, in Crete, where large-scale looting took place in 1964, followed by rescue excavations by the Greek archaeological service in 1968 and 1969. The Met’s records indicate that they entered the collection in 1989 as a gift from the Norbert Schimmel Trust. In at least one case, the published provenance adds an earlier attribution to Byron Zoumpoulakis, in Geneva, and the Norbert Schimmel collection from before 1967. The general statement does not develop this chain, nor does it explain why the documentation gathered now was enough to return the five pieces.
The same press release, two stories
The statement presents the restitution as part of a collaboration that is growing closer, and supplies the evidence in the same text. On 20 December, Across Wine-Dark Seas: Art and Identity beyond Ancient Greece opens at the Met, with more than one hundred and eighty works and loans from eleven countries. Among them will be the griffin head from Olympia that the museum agreed to return to Greece in 2025. It will come back to New York on loan from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia and will be shown for the first time alongside two other related griffin heads.
A piece can, therefore, change ownership without disappearing from the same gallery. It no longer belongs to the Met, but it may be seen there again through a loan authorised by Greece.
There is more. The Met is exhibiting the Stern collection of Cycladic art: one hundred and sixty-one works owned by the Greek state and lent on a long-term basis. The agreement distinguishes two periods. The collection will remain on display at the Met for twenty-five years, with partial returns and reciprocal loans after the first ten; the cultural collaboration runs for fifty years and envisages that other Greek Cycladic works will continue to arrive at the museum during the following twenty-five years.
In October 2025, the Met also announced the return of twelve objects after receiving new information related to the District Attorney’s investigation into Fortuna Fine Arts. That statement did expressly name the gallery under investigation. The difference strengthens the question in the 2026 case: the museum knows and publishes the immediate provenance of the three works, but has not clarified which of those actors are the investigated dealers it alludes to.
Ownership, custody, gallery
In my interpretation, we usually take three things to go together when we speak of an object in a museum: who owns it, who looks after it and where it can be seen. Here they come apart. Ownership passes to Greece, the gallery may remain the Met’s, and custody depends on each agreement.
For the visitor to the museum in New York, the difference may be slight. For the legal and institutional circulation of the piece, it is decisive: it changes who can say no. When the museum was the owner, it decided whether to exhibit, move or lend it within the applicable limits. When ownership is Greek, the Met needs a loan and must accept its conditions, its term, and the possibility that Greece may not grant or renew it.
This does not automatically make the subsequent loan a way of disguising the restitution. It may be a model of cooperation and access, and the museum presents it as such. Nor does it let us ignore what remains unexplained. To evaluate a restitution, it is not enough to know that the object legally returns to the country of origin: what matters is how it left, whose hands it passed through, what documentation accompanied its acquisition, and when the museum had sufficient grounds to review the title.
The Met claims to have the largest provenance research team of any museum in the world. That is an institutional claim. What can be verified here is more limited: the individual records publish names and transactions that the statement omits, but they do not unequivocally identify the investigated dealers, nor do they reveal the District Attorney’s new evidence. The restitution corrects the title. Transparency makes it possible to understand why it was necessary to correct it.
About the open conversation
This text continues the line of the Notebook on restitution and the forms of custody that accompany it. It starts from the museum's own statement and catalogue records, and distinguishes between the published provenance and what has not yet been explained. If you work in provenance research, in archaeological museums, or in heritage law and can provide additional documentation, write to me.
Sources
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, record for the terracotta beak-spouted jug, object 1994.587.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, record for the marble head of a veiled man, object 1991.11.5.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, record for an Afrati mitra, object 1989.281.53.