Fragmented pots and Dietrich von Bothmer

Fragments of (mostly Athenian) figure-decorated pots constitute one subcategory among the antiquities being returned to Italy. A key collector of such fragments was Dietrich von Bothmer, a distinguished curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1946–2009. Some of the pots returned to Italy from the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art include fragments supplied by Bothmer. His collection of more than 20,000 fragments resides for the most part in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Villa as part of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Bothmer was generous in donating fragments from his collection to fit with pieces in other museums such as the Musée du Louvre and the Ashmolean Museum. This study will use a sample of the collection to consider Bothmer’s sources for his fragments, antiquities dealers including Edoardo Almagià, Robert Hecht, Jonathan P. Rosen, and Frieda Tchacos. The research raises the possibility that some fragments from figure- decorated pottery were deliberately dispersed among dealers and collectors to disguise the mechanism of the illicit market in antiquities and that Bothmer may have played a role in facilitating their movements.