British auction house Bonhams recently withdrew a Roman marble head of Hermes from its antiquities sale in London, after a researcher provided evidence of links to Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in Italy in 2011 of dealing in illegal antiquities.

Bonhams withdrew the head, which was estimated at $17,000-25,000, at the request of Greece’s Directorate of Documentation and Protection of Cultural Property of the Ministry of Culture and Sport.

The work was displayed in seized photographs showing a possible origin and illegal export from Greece.

Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, a research assistant with the Trafficking Culture Project, at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, turned up pictures from the so-called ‘Becchina Archives’, a collection of photos and documents confiscated by Italian and Swiss authorities in 2002 and 2005.

The archives were particularly damning as they laid out the scope and extent of Becchina’s trade in looted objects.

“The origin of the head is Greece, because it is a Greek looter named Costas Gaitanis … who sent to Becchina on May 29th, 1987, the Polaroids depicting the head,” Tsirogiannis wrote to David Gill of Looted Matters.

According to the Bonhams catalogue page prior to withdrawal of the lot, the circa 1st to 2nd century AD head was in the collection of Nicolas Koutoulakis from 1965, five years prior to the UNESCO Convention that was designed to halt the trade in looted antiquities.

Source: artnet.com