Phoenix Ancient Art, located in Geneva and New York City, is a second-generation antiquities dealer specializing in Greek and Roman ancient art. [1] Its works of art have been purchased by arts and antiquities private collectors as well as museums such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre Museum in Paris. They have historically dealt in antiquities from the Sumerian art and Ancient Roman artistic traditions, as well as from Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian civilizations.
Phoenix Ancient Art has facilitated numerous museum acquisitions of seminal ancient art objects.
Noteworthy sales and provenances from Phoenix include:
Phoenix Ancient Art was founded by the Lebanese businessman Sleiman Aboutaam in 1968 [15] and incorporated in 1995. The business continues today under the leadership of his son, Ali Aboutaam, and his son, Hicham Aboutaam has his own New York based gallery, Electrum. [16] [15]
Ali and Hicham were born in Beirut in 1965 and 1967 respectively. In the 1980s, at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, Ali was kidnapped by a Syrian gang and held hostage until Sleiman procured his release. [17] Following the incident, the family (Sleiman, Souad, the boys and their sister Noura) relocated to Geneva, Switzerland, where they continue to operate a branch of the business today.
In the early 90s, the young men earned a formidable reputation as buyers. Nicknamed "Tall and Taller" by the socialite set (such as those attending events with art collector Leon Levy and his wife Shelby White), they were the awe and the fear of fellow industry players. [18]
In 1998, the brothers assumed control of the family business. The takeover would have been a natural succession, but it was marked by the sudden loss of Sleiman and Souad on Swissair Flight 111. [19] The resilience demonstrated by the Hicham and Ali was staggering, and proved important through the changing tides of the antiquities market.
In 2023, Ali Aboutaam, the founder of Phoenix Ancient Art, has received an 18-month suspended jail sentence from a court in Geneva for violating the law on the transfer of cultural properties and use of forged provenance documents. He pleaded guilty to the charges, concluding a six-year investigation. [20]
In April 2009, Phoenix Ancient Art launched e-Tiquities.com, an e-commerce platform for a wide range of artworks, also including jewelry, figurines, amulets, sculpture and pottery from regions as diverse as ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantium, Egypt, the Near East and the Islamic world. [21] [22]
In early 2014, Phoenix Ancient Art opened a second gallery in Geneva called ‘Phoenix Ancient Art Young Collectors’, a unique gallery space that exhibits a large variety of objects from the 6th millennium B.C. through the 14th century A.D. [23] [24]
On June 12, 2019, Phoenix Ancient Art opened a new gallery in Brussels. [25]
Phoenix Ancient Art participates in a number of international fairs, such as the Biennale des Antiquaires (Paris), the Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair BRAFA (Brussels), the International Fine Art and Antiques Show (New York City), [16] the PAD (London), the Point Art Fine Art Fair (Monaco), the Salon Art + Design (New York), [26] the Spring Masters Fair (New York), [27] and TEFAF (New York). [28] They also hold local themed events in their galleries several times a year accompanied by their gallery publications which include:
The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement and home to some of the most canonical works of Western art, including the Mona Lisa,Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French kings.
The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, commonly known as the Egyptian Museum, located in Cairo, Egypt, houses the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world. It houses over 120,000 items, with a representative amount on display. Located in Tahrir Square in a building built in 1901, it is the largest museum in Africa. Among its masterpieces are Pharaoh Tutankhamun's treasure, including its iconic gold burial mask, widely considered one of the best-known works of art in the world and a prominent symbol of ancient Egypt.
Ancient art refers to the many types of art produced by the advanced cultures of ancient societies with different forms of writing, such as those of ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The art of pre-literate societies is normally referred to as prehistoric art and is not covered here. Although some pre-Columbian cultures developed writing during the centuries before the arrival of Europeans, on grounds of dating these are covered at pre-Columbian art and articles such as Maya art, Aztec art, and Olmec art.
Dendera, also spelled Denderah, ancient Iunet 𓉺𓈖𓏏𓊖 “jwn.t”, Tentyris,(Arabic: Ewan-t إيوان-ة ), or Tentyra is a small town and former bishopric in Egypt situated on the west bank of the Nile, about 5 kilometres (3 mi) south of Qena, on the opposite side of the river. It is located approximately 60 kilometres (37 mi) north of Luxor and remains a Latin Catholic titular see. It contains the Dendera Temple complex, one of the best-preserved temple sites from ancient Upper Egypt.
Ancient Egyptian art refers to art produced in ancient Egypt between the 6th millennium BC and the 4th century AD, spanning from Prehistoric Egypt until the Christianization of Roman Egypt. It includes paintings, sculptures, drawings on papyrus, faience, jewelry, ivories, architecture, and other art media. It was a conservative tradition whose style changed very little over time. Much of the surviving examples comes from tombs and monuments, giving insight into the ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs.
The sculpture of ancient Greece is the main surviving type of fine ancient Greek art as, with the exception of painted ancient Greek pottery, almost no ancient Greek painting survives. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages in monumental sculpture in bronze and stone: the Archaic, Classical (480–323) and Hellenistic. At all periods there were great numbers of Greek terracotta figurines and small sculptures in metal and other materials.
The Dendera Temple complex is located about 2.5 kilometres (1.6 mi) south-east of Dendera, Egypt. It is one of the best-preserved temple complexes of ancient Egypt. The area was used as the sixth nome of Upper Egypt, south of Abydos.
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens houses some of the most important artifacts from a variety of archaeological locations around Greece from prehistory to late antiquity. It is considered one of the greatest museums in the world and contains the richest collection of Greek Antiquity artifacts worldwide. It is situated in the Exarcheia area in central Athens between Epirus Street, Bouboulinas Street and Tositsas Street while its entrance is on the Patission Street adjacent to the historical building of the Athens Polytechnic university.
The study of Roman sculpture is complicated by its relation to Greek sculpture. Many examples of even the most famous Greek sculptures, such as the Apollo Belvedere and Barberini Faun, are known only from Roman Imperial or Hellenistic "copies". At one time, this imitation was taken by art historians as indicating a narrowness of the Roman artistic imagination, but, in the late 20th century, Roman art began to be reevaluated on its own terms: some impressions of the nature of Greek sculpture may in fact be based on Roman artistry.
A rosette is a round, stylized flower design.
The Antinous Mondragone is a 0.95-metre high marble example of the Mondragone type of the deified Antinous. This colossal head was made sometime in the period between 130 AD to 138 AD and then is believed to have been rediscovered in the early 18th century, near the ruined Roman city, Tusculum. After its rediscovery, it was housed at the Villa Mondragone as a part of the Borghese collection, and in 1807, it was sold to Napoleon Bonaparte; it is now housed in the Louvre in Paris, France.
The Esquiline Venus, depicting the goddess Venus, is a smaller-than-life-size Roman nude marble sculpture of a female in sandals and a diadem headdress. It is widely viewed as a 1st-century AD Roman copy of a Greek original from the 1st century BC. It is also a possible depiction of the Ptolemaic ruler Cleopatra VII.
The Staatliche Antikensammlungen is a museum in Munich's Kunstareal holding Bavaria's collections of antiquities from Greece, Etruria and Rome, though the sculpture collection is located in the opposite Glyptothek and works created in Bavaria are on display in a separate museum. Ancient Egypt also has its own museum.
The Archaeological Museum of Eretria is a museum in Eretria, in the Euboea regional unit of Central Greece.
Roman portraiture was one of the most significant periods in the development of portrait art. The surviving portraits of individuals are almost entirely sculptures, covering a period of almost five centuries. Roman portraiture is characterised by unusual realism and the desire to convey images of nature in the high quality style often seen in ancient Roman art. Some busts even seem to show clinical signs. Several images and statues made in marble and bronze have survived in small numbers. Roman funerary art includes many portraits such as married couple funerary reliefs, which were most often made for wealthy freedmen rather than the patrician elite.
The Museum of Antiquities is an archaeological museum at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. It opened in 1974 to provide an opportunity to study ancient works. The museum currently features a variety of Greek and Roman sculpture, and contains a collection of Near Eastern, Egyptian, Byzantine, Islamic and Medieval art. It is one of only a handful of museums of its kind in Canada.
The Isis Tomb is a richly endowed Etruscan chamber tomb that was found at the Polledrara Cemetery, Vulci, Lazio, Italy, in the early nineteenth century. Many artefacts were discovered in the Isis Tomb when it was originally excavated but, as was custom at the time, only objects of high monetary value were kept. Over 60 of these objects are now held by the British Museum, with others scattered across a range of museums around the world.
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Several non-native societies had an influence on Ancient Pompeian culture. Historians’ interpretation of artefacts, preserved by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, identify that such foreign influences came largely from Greek and Hellenistic cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt. Greek influences were transmitted to Pompeii via the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia, which were formed in the 8th century BC. Hellenistic influences originated from Roman commerce, and later conquest of Egypt from the 2nd century BC.
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