"There are things which are not made for the eyes of men": What Alice Rohrwacher tells us about illicit trafficking of cultural property in "La Chimera"
From as early as the prehistoric era, human beings have sought ways to confer cultural meaning to their existence. Indeed, one of their primary instincts has been the desire to leave symbolic traces and marks of their passage on Earth for those who will come after them. Once humanity has developed the concepts of past and future, works of art and monuments began to assume a truly symbolic significance. They have served to establish a link and a sense of continuity between generations across the centuries. In this way, cultural heritage becomes a mirror of humanity—of its evolution and progress. It represents the highest expression of what a society has achieved, of what it values, and of what it believes in. The way we treat and regard cultural and artistic heritage, in turn, becomes an important measure of our own cultural identity.
To inherit that patrimony, is not merely to admire it, but to assume responsibility for it. When heritage becomes a commodity absorbed into the ferocious logics of the market, that responsibility shatters. Alice Rohrwacher portrays this in La Chimera, a movie presented at the Cannes Festival in 2023.
It tells us the story of a group of tomb raiders – the infamous “tombaroli” – in 1980’s land of Etruria, in a remote village of the rural Umbria. It is a fiabesque and yet bitter film, studded with mythological references, that invites us to reflect on the art system, its moral aspects and beyond it, its inherent paradoxes. The protagonist is a young and enigmatic English archeologist named Arthur, who joins a group of “tombaroli” who illegally dig up ancient Etruscan tombs to loot archeological artifacts and sell them to the black market.
Illicit excavation and looting of cultural goods were a common practice in Italy in the 20th century; it was considered to be a low risk and high profit activity due to the ease with which the traded objects could be concealed, the legal loopholes which made prosecution and enforcement difficult. This practice often offered an escape from poverty for individuals pursuing the desire for social and economic mobility – an aspiration that, as La Chimera suggests, the art market’s leading players were quick to exploit.
In this movie, the director pays tribute to her fascination with archeology and the Etruscan civilization. The Etruscans sanctified the soul, believing that it could go beyond earthly existence. In this civilization, art functioned as the bridge between the earthly and the afterlife. In the necropolises, tombs were not mere graves, but monumental spaces ornamented with wall paintings portraying scenes of life, death and myth, and containing statues, bronze vessels, ceramics and other precious artifacts. They believed that the world of the living could be carried across the afterlife. The Etruscans left behind a very rich artistic heritage, and despite that, made the choice to hide it, to seal it beneath the earth, and to keep it away from the human eye.
Clandestine excavation most often destroys the archeological context, which also erases information about the object’s function and meaning. The movie depicts looting of these ancient tombs as a practice marked by brutality, greed and ignorance, at odds with the cultural and sacred significance of these archaeological sites. In a scene, Arthur and his companions find an untouched Etruscan tomb filled with relics, among them a marvelous white marble statue of a goddess. As the light penetrates the chamber, the frescoed murals become less vivid, and the images start thinning into shadow. The tombaroli then proceed to cut the head from the rest of the statue to facilitate its transport out of the chamber.
This is the fil rouge of the movie: “some things are not made for the eyes of men”.
In the film, the tombarolo is referred to as a mere “drop in the sea”: a marginal figure absorbed into a mechanism ruled by collectors, dealers, museums and the upper bourgeoisie– actors who are no less entangled in this illicit mechanism. Illicit trafficking of cultural property is thus represented not as an isolated crime but as the first link in a chain of demand. These illicit activities were not only sustained by the wrongdoers and the tombaroli, but most importantly by this hierarchy of demand (that?) constituted the upper echelons of the art market. In the film, the figure of Spartaco, the trafficker and handler of the stolen works, makes this explicit: “[the tombaroli] they think they are art traffickers, predators, but they are only small cogs working for us”.
At the core of this machinery lies the question of provenance. Research into the antiquities market has shown that most antiquities offered for sale or held in private collections lack documentation proving lawful origin, and many are traded with no provenance proofs (proof of provenance?) at all. The provenance of many artefacts is often obscured as they pass through layers of international intermediaries – dealers, auction houses, collectors or free ports – before they enter the prestigious collections and museums. Through these intermediaries, the artefact acquires a “new identity” supported by documentation, that is often fabricated, and hence creating a false provenance (for example, forged invoices, export permits, or collection records). Institutions dedicated to preservation and valorization of culture frequently end up validating the market value of these looted artifacts. In this sense, provenance is not a mere technical detail but the ethical and legal core of the art trade.
Rohrwacher shows us how the beauty of the past needs to be cherished by those who are truly capable of caring for it, keeping it away from the exploiters and the greedy.
Archaeology reminds us that the present is a layer within a vast stratification of time, which is destined, in turn, to become a part of the past. The awareness that civilizations who came before us have left behind something beautiful suggests an ethical imperative: we carry the same responsibility and duty to leave something beautiful behind us as well. Archeology is a discipline that reconstructs meaning from what remains after endings, and reminds us that things are finite, that we are finite. Thus, it is important to ask ourselves what legacy and traces we are willing to leave to posterity.
Author: Ludovica Firpo
