Booktryst on the Zeyt'un Gospels

The blog 'Booktryst: A nest for book lovers takes a refreshing look at the use of temporary institutional exhibitions to launder illicit antiquities. The post (The Case Of The Purloined Letter And The (Allegedly) Stolen Bible, Part Two) discusses the dispute with the Getty Museum over the rightful owner of seven pages [the canon Tables in fact] ripped from a 13th century illuminated manuscript known as the Zeyt'un Gospels. The Getty claims it has every right to these pages, noting that "these canon tables were separated from the manuscript at some point in the past and eventually acquired by the Getty Museum, while the rest of the manuscript is in a public collection in Armenia". The Museum is "confident that it has legal ownership of these pages, [...] which have been widely published, studied and exhibited." It says the pages were purchased only "after a thorough review of their provenance," though not apparently how they were ripped out of the object in the first place (apparently during the 1915 genocide of the Armenians by the Turks), and that the upcoming lawsuit on behalf of the Armenian Church to get it back "is groundless and should be dismissed". As Nancy Mattoon sarcastically remarks:

The vague language used to describe the history of these pages makes it sound like they just accidentally slipped out of the binding and got lost. As if that happens all the time. Churches just lose track of the most important pages of their sacred religious texts, and they turn up in a museum 7,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic sixty years later.

She points out that the claim the object is "rightfully ripped-out" because it has been previously exhibited and nobody then cried foul is also pretty reprehensible:

The Getty has also been known to indulge in what has become a fairly common practice for museums unsure of the ownership background of ancient works: "antiquity laundering." Pieces with shady backgrounds start out in private hands for some years, then are loaned to a prestigious museum for a high profile exhibition. Photos and descriptions of the pieces are published in an exhibit catalog, and presto!, provenance is established. Of course this never accounts for how the items were removed from their country of origin in the first place. The Getty has in at least one case purchased an entire collection of questionable antiquities from a private collector, with the only published "provenance" being two exhibit catalogs produced when the items were on loan: one from the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the other from (you guessed it) the Getty itself.