Two looted Visigothic pendants sold to the Met recovered in the United States

"Restored," reads a notice on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website in New York City about a Visigothic bronze harness pendant, featuring a mounted horseman and dated to the 6th century, which was "made in the Iberian Peninsula." On July 24, it was repatriated from the United States to Spain along with another Visigothic harness pendant, also from the 6th century and featuring two beasts facing each other.

Both objects, some 1,500 years old, were " trafficked by Robin Symes " and " sold to the Met in 1990 without prior provenance ," according to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, whose Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU) seized them in 2025.

The English dealer Robin Symes, who died in 2023, worked for decades for wealthy and famous collectors, as well as for major museums around the world, such as the Met, which later found themselves in trouble due to the illegal provenance of many of the works he sold to them.

US authorities also recently seized seven other Tarentine objects from the 6th and 3rd centuries BC from tombs in southern Italy that Symes sold to the New York museum between 1996 and 1999. These pieces have since been returned, in this case to Italy, along with a fragment of a capital and a column of Tarentine limestone, donated to the museum without determining their provenance.

The United States also returned to Italy on August 5 61 fragments of a terracotta column krater attributed to the Lydos Painter, dating from 580 BC. "Their story illustrates the complex efforts smugglers make to traffic their looted antiquities: they break the objects into fragments to sell individually and bring them to market over several years," the District Attorney's Office states in its statement, in which Robin Symes's name appears again. The British antiquarian loaned some of them to the Getty Museum, others were donated by Robert Hecht to the Princeton Art Museum and by Jonathan Rosen to the Met.

The latter acquired the remaining fragments now returned to Italy in 1997, along with a first-century AD marble Alexander head depicting Alexander the Great as Helios, the sun god. Excavated from the Basilica Aemilia in the Roman Forum, it was stolen from the Museo Antiquarium Forense in Rome and, after being laundered through various individuals and institutions in New York, was acquired in good faith by Alan Safani in 2017. The piece was seized pursuant to a court order, and Safani eventually agreed to surrender the head for repatriation, the District Attorney's Office statement said.

A 17th-century Jesuit manuscript seized from a rare book dealer in New York was also returned to Hungary. This 'Nervus Opticus Sive Tractatus Theoricus in Tres Libros' was published by the Jesuit Zacharias Traber in 1675 and was illegally removed from the library of the Eötvös József Collegium in Budapest during World War II. The investigation used multispectral imaging to identify that a seal bearing the name of the Eötvös József Collegium had been erased to facilitate the laundering of the piece.

The 31 antiquities recently repatriated by the United States to Spain, Italy, and Hungary were recovered as a result of criminal investigations into multiple antiquities trafficking networks involving, among others, convicted traffickers Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, Robin Symes, Robert Hecht, Eugene Alexander, and alleged trafficker Edoardo Almagià, who is awaiting extradition from Italy. To date, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has made 37 seizures of 295 objects trafficked by Almagià, collectively valued at more than $6 million.

From Spain, Consul General Marta de Blas expressed her gratitude for "the excellent work and diligence of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the New York District Attorney's Office" in the recovery of the two Spanish antiquities and highlighted "the excellent cooperation between both countries in the fight against trafficking in cultural property."

Last March, US authorities handed over to the Civil Guard a Visigothic medallion dating from between the 5th and 7th centuries AD that had been looted from the Extremaduran town of Peraleda de la Mata and was being offered in a New York gallery for approximately 210,000 euros.