The Dallas Museum of Art is expected to announce Monday that it will voluntarily return an ancient mosaic in its collection to the Republic of Turkey, after determining that the work â€" which dates from 194 A.D. and shows Orpheus taming animals with his lyre â€" was probably stolen from a Turkish archaeological site.
The decision, part of a new plan by the museum to more actively seek international exchange agreements with foreign institutions, comes at a time when the Turkish government has become much more aggressive in seeking antiquities it believes were looted from its soil. In recent months, it has pressed the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several other museums around the world to return objects and, to increase its leverage, it has refused loan requests to some museums. (The Met says that the objects sought by Turkey were legally acquired in the European antiquities market in the 1960s before being donated to the museum in 1989.)
The Dallas mosaic, bou ght at auction at Christie's in 1999, is thought to have once decorated the floor of a Roman building near Edessa in what is now Turkey.
Maxwell L. Anderson, the museum's director, said that when he took over at the beginning of 2012, he asked antiquities curators to identify objects that might have provenance problems. “What I didn't want to happen here was a succession of slow-motion claims coming at us,†Mr. Anderson said in an interview. Turkish officials had been searching for the mosaic, he said, and when the museum contacted them, they provided Mr. Anderson with photographs of the looted site.
“I saw that and even as a novice, I said: ‘Done,'†he said.
Cemalettin Aydin, the consul general of Turkey in Houston, who was expected to take possession of the mosaic at a ceremony in Dallas Monday morning, said in prepared remarks that he applauded the museum's “unwavering ethical stance†and added that the restitution would lead to an active l oan arrangement between Turkey and the Dallas museum.
