Naples, Alexander's mosaic goes on display in Japan? MANN: no agreement

Attack on the restoration of the Naples National Archaeological Museum’s Battle of Issus. Complicated work was started on the mosaic two weeks ago: the artifact, also known as the “Mosaic of Alexander the Great,” is one of MANN’s most famous works, and for many it is the main reason for visiting, and now the work is at the center of some very critical comments, which arose on social media, revolving around an alleged loan of the work to the National Museum of Tokyo in Japan and theHermitage in St. Petersburg , Russia, for two exhibitions.

Igniting tempers on Facebook was Senator Margherita Corrado (Mixed Group), in a post under which a very animated discussion was produced, and in which the parliamentarian writes: “it is not for us or for humanity to come that the conservation work is being carried out, but rather to transfer the artifact to the Tokyo Museum and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Today, the international loans of our masterpieces, including identity works for individual Institutes, even if fragile, are planned like the maintenance of the plant or the need for personnel, without the need to justify them anymore with some unprecedented extraordinary recurrence or exhibition-event, without involving the scientific committee, which is, after all, politically appointed, nor the distant Roman offices of general management that nothing more directs, not even the traffic (of cultural goods on loan). The Museum, instead of guarding the monument (in the literal sense of an object, even a movable one, that admonishes, that defies time, history by offering itself to our knowledge and that of future generations, and as such is a CULTURAL FACT), makes it go around the world so that everyone can see it. Which, moreover, makes the classic educational trip to Italy unnecessary for foreigners.”

We therefore sought clarification from the Archaeological Museum of Naples, which has not intervened in the diatribe. “Thanks to the press and social campaign that we launched,” the institute’s press office let us know, “the restoration of the Mosaic is simply underway: this intervention is being carried out under the supervision of the Central Institute for Restoration, after diagnostic activities carried out in a network with the University of Molise and CRACS; no practice has been initiated regarding loans. We have only specified in the strategic plan the desire to take the mosaic to Tokyo and the Hermitage but there are no signed agreements. Our primary goal is to urgently restore the mosaic that no one had ever thought of preserving. And we have succeeded thanks to autonomy, which is first and foremost a strategic ability to weave scientific relationships.”

That this is not an intervention to send the work to the four corners of the globe, but it is a restoration to make up for some conservation problems, the museum had already specified after the results of the analysis: the mosaic, in particular, presents detachments of tesserae, lesions, bulges and lowering of the surface (especially in the central right area, which is strongly lowered, and along the edges, which instead present diffusis bulges). The work also has fractures and a lesion that had already been veiled during previous restorations. The mosaic, after all, is a "special guard," one might say with a misnomer but one that makes the point well: in the last few years alone it has been the subject of two diagnostic investigations (one conducted in 2015 by the CNR of Pisa and Iperion and one in 2018 by the CNR and the University of Molise) aimed at documenting the work’s state of conservation. The analyses showed the need to proceed with maintenance work (and an additional diagnostic campaign, conducted by the University of Molise and CRACS of the University Federico II of Naples, started shortly before the start of the intervention: it was necessary to prepare it), without considering that the museum also expressed the need to improve the conditions of organic reading of the Battle of Isso mosaic.

Pictured is a detail of the mosaic

Naples, Alexander's mosaic goes on display in Japan? MANN: no agreement

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