Mon Jul 29, 9:12 PM ET
ASUNCION, Paraguay (Reuters) - Robbers who spent two months digging a tunnel into a museum in Paraguay have made off with five paintings by old masters valued at well over $1 million (640,000 pounds), police say.
The thieves were believed to have already fled the country with the centuries-old loot including a self-portrait from 1570 by Italian Jacopo Robusti as well as works by Spain's Esteban Murillo, France's Adolphe Piot, pre-Impressionist Gustave Courbet and an anonymous Italian painter. "They've very old paintings that never would have been sold at a public auction. This robbery was contracted by someone who paid a lot to get the job done," said Charlotte Schultz, a curator for the museum, told reporters on Monday. Police found shovels and picks across the street from the museum in an empty shop, which they said the robbers apparently rented two months ago under false identities. From there, they dug a tunnel 10 feet (3.5 metres) underground that extended to the museum 25 yards away, illuminating their path with electric light bulbs and reinforcing the ceiling with wooden poles.
The four largest paintings had been removed from their frames, which on Monday sat neatly on the floor of the museum. Curators said they did not know the value of the paintings, which formed part of a private collection. However, art critics consulted by Reuters placed the combined value of the loot at far beyond $1 million. Officials at Paraguay's largest state-owned museum said they are short on security guards due to a budget crunch in the South American country, whose economy has been on the decline for two decades. "The robbers must be art collectors," Schultz said. "They acted with such total perfection." http://story.news.yahoo.com/
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By LORI ELMORE-MOON Special to the Star-Telegram
CLEBURNE - Floor lamps will temporarily replace overhead lighting at the 98-year-old Carnegie Building as a precaution against fire, but some Layland Museum board members believe the structure should be shut down until it can be rewired. City officials say that by using floor lamps plugged into some of the building's newer wiring, the fire hazards have been lessened. A $125,000 rewiring job is scheduled to start in September. But Layland advisory board members Perry Anderson and Rex McGee said the city is taking a chance with a $1 million historic building, $1 million in irreplaceable museum artifacts and the lives of those who go to the museum and the second- floor theater. "I just think it should be closed to the public until they fix the wiring," Anderson said. "It should have been [closed] five or six years ago."
The building's knob-and-tube wiring with cloth-covered, decaying rubber coating is a century out of date and considered a fire hazard. Retired city building inspector Richard Lacey said, "My suggestion [in 1997] was that the thing needed to be rewired ... because of the overload and the problems that they were having."
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The Layland Museum is on the first floor of one of the surviving structures built as libraries with money donated by Andrew Carnegie, museum director/curator Julie Baker said. It is designated as a Historic Texas Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Carnegie Players, a theater group, rents the second floor and plans to begin rehearsals next month for Moon Over Buffalo, which begins performances in September.
That makes Anderson nervous.
When you've got a crowd of 150 people upstairs watching a play, I have a horror of thinking of a fire in that building and all these people are upstairs and they've just got one way out." City officials say the rewiring is tentatively scheduled to begin after the production.
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"We really want to try to allow as much activity to go on in the building as much as possible," Miles said. "If we do it in a safe manner, I think we can work through the whole situation."
full story: http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/local/3756174.htm
Marbles Lost and Found
In the Parthenon's Shadow, an Old Grievance Gets Put on a Pedestal
By Kirstin Downey Grimsley Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, July 29, 2002; Page C01
ATHENS -- A $100 million museum being built here in hopes of shaming the British government into giving back sculptures taken two centuries ago is creating controversy in Greece, where a growing number of critics say the government is damaging other antiquities in a rush to make the museum ready in time for the 2004 Olympics. They charge that excavation at the museum's site at the foot of the great Acropolis citadel has uncovered substantial Roman, Byzantine and Stone Age ruins that provide vivid archaeological snapshots of ancient Athens, and that development should be delayed while the remains are studied. "What is happening is a crime," said Giorgos Dontas, president of Athens's archaeological society, who has urged the Greek government to pick another site for the museum, even if it delays construction by a decade. Greek officials defend their selection, saying all antiquities uncovered there are being properly protected and catalogued -- and some outside experts agree. Work must continue, officials say, because a new facility is vitally needed to take over from a small Acropolis museum that isn't big enough to properly exhibit the trove of items found over the centuries. Under the government's plan, the museum's prime exhibit would be sculptures that once graced the Parthenon, the columned temple that is the Acropolis's centerpiece. Taken away in 1801 by British diplomat Lord Elgin, the sculptures are now on display at the British Museum in London as the Elgin Marbles. So far, the British government has refused to give them up. The construction site, located just off the ancient Plaka district in Athens, is closed off from public view, but from the bedroom windows of an adjacent apartment building, a dense honeycomb of ruins is visible, partially draped by a canvas tarp flapping in the wind.
Dismayed residents there have taken pictures that appear to show construction workers taking to ancient walls with pickaxes and jackhammers. "It's pure vandalism," said prominent Greek artist Yiannis Hainis, who has gathered 300 signatures from Greek intellectuals opposing the museum's construction. Greek Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos has pledged that the new Acropolis Museum will be ready by 2004, regardless of the controversy. In a statement released last week, he said that newspaper reports in Britain raising questions about the project were intended to alienate International Olympic Committee officials who were visiting Greece. Achilles Paparsenos, a spokesman for the Greek government in Washington, said the antiquities found at the new museum site were being handled with "every care." Greek officials have spent years deliberating over the location and design of the museum, which will be built on stilts to avoid disturbing the remains underneath. Huge windows would allow visitors to catch glimpses of the Parthenon high overhead and the ruins below while they view exhibits. The Parthenon marbles were removed from Greece when the nation was ruled by the Ottoman Turks; Greeks have always regarded the transfer as a case of looting. "The marbles have been stripped from the place where they were supposed to be," said Paparsenos. "The reunification of the marbles with the monument is something we really believe should be done." Greece has made their return a point of diplomatic friction with Britain for decades, but so far without success, despite the help of a group of sympathetic British parliamentarians. British officials maintain that their country acquired the marbles legally, preserved them for future generations and have suggested that Greece is not capable of properly protecting and displaying them.
Construction of the museum is intended to undermine the last of those contentions. The project is part of a vast effort by the Greek government to ready the Acropolis for the flood of tourists expected when the Summer Games return in two years to the nation where they were born. More than 80 engineers, architects and stonemasons are working steadily to repair damage created by time, pollution and previous restoration attempts. A construction crane now looms 50 feet high in the middle of the Parthenon, near the spot where an imposing ivory-and-gold statue of the goddess Athena once held court. Workers are using the crane to lift tons of chipping alabaster marble, which is then repaired and put back in its proper location. Efforts are also underway to repair damage left where concrete and iron were used to hold stone pieces, reassembled puzzlelike from piles of rubble, in place. Engineers now know that when iron rusts, it causes marble to crack and discolor, and that concrete can turn into a growth medium for algae. At the 2,500-year-old ruins, today's restorers are using pioneering laser and microwave devices to clean off a dark crust caused by air pollution. The beautiful little Temple of Athena Nike, which normally stands guard over the entryway to the Acropolis complex, has been disassembled, awaiting the insertion of a titanium skeleton that engineers expect will hold it firmly together, without danger of rust. Greek archaeologist Lena Lambrinou, who is overseeing the Parthenon restoration effort, stood on the temple's steps at midday recently, inspecting the work. She said archaeologists working atop the Acropolis and at the new museum take their responsibility very seriously, and that every effort is being made to assure nothing of value is damaged. "We're trying to be ready for the Olympics, but the main thing is to do the right job, not to do it quick and not well," Lambrinou said, echoing other Greek officials.
Several classical archaeologists said they believed the government was proceeding responsibly, and that there were few other site choices in the densely packed city. Some who have visited the site said that the finds there were of minor interest, but were being well catalogued and handled with professionalism. In their view, the need for the exhibition space outweighed the value of the antiquities discovered there. "There are pros and cons," said Stephen G. Miller, a professor of classical archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley who has worked at many sites in Greece and is familiar with the museum project. "My personal feeling is that [the museum site] is the best possible solution to a difficult problem. There are going to be critics -- there always are." Archaeologists say Greece faces unique difficulties because its long and rich history has deposited antiquities seemingly everywhere. "The whole country is like a museum," said James Wiseman, a professor of archaeology at Boston University who directs the Center for Archaeological Studies there. "Every time they try to do anything -- build a house, farm -- they run into antiquities and the project needs to be stopped." Construction of the Athens subway system, for example, was delayed for 35 years as opponents argued that it would endanger too many priceless artifacts. It was only recently completed. Repeated legal challenges have delayed but not blocked another Olympics-related venue, a rowing and canoeing center at an artificial lake to be built north of Athens. The site is on the coast where the Persians and Greeks fought the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. Environmentalists say the development there would destroy a rare bird habitat, and historians have worried about endangering one of the world's most famous battlefields. Archaeologist Lambrinou said she remains optimistic that most of the temple complex will be ready by 2004, including the museum, and that Olympic visitors will get the best possible appreciation of the Acropolis, the single most important symbol of Greek civilization during the 5th century B.C., when democracy first flowered.
"Sometimes you can see miracles in Greece," she said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Bring back Queen Nefertiti, Rosetta stone
The head of Nefertiti currently on exhibition at Berlin Museum and the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum are among several items that the Antiquities Authority hopes to have brought back to Egypt, Dr Zahi Hawas, Secretary- General of the Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) said at a meeting in Alexandria last week.
High-level contacts are under way to retrieve the statue of Ankh Haf, one of the architects who designed and built the Cheops Pyramid, and some thirty obelisks from overseas. Ankh Haf is at present in a New York Museum, Dr Hawas said"Scottish police have recovered 1,000 antiquities that had been spirited out of Egypt and the alleged smuggler have been charged. A delegation is to fly to Scotland within the next few days to assess the artifacts and bring them back," Dr Hawas said. As for antiquities exhibitions overseas, notably the traveling exhibition of 143 items in the US, Dr Hawas said that the experiment had proved worthwhile judging by public interest and the financial gains. The US exhibition will be held until 2007 in thirteen American states. On its first leg, the event earned $80 million dollars, he said.
Dr Hawas went on to speak of a comprehensive plan to develop Egyptian museums nationwide, saying that the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is the best place to start. A panoramic mural is being designed to show the muse. http://www.uk.sis.gov.eg/