Provenance

Each object is shown only if its holding museum publishes a record for it, and the card links to that record. Find-spot, inventory number and acquisition history are copied as the museum publishes them, and are never improved by us.

Many museums use 17 November 1970, the date the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was signed, as the threshold for acquiring antiquities. The American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors (2013 guidelines) and the Smithsonian all ask for proof that an object was out of its country of modern discovery by that date, or was legally exported after it.

Flags on every card

• Find-spot documented The museum record names a find-spot.
• Find-spot to be confirmed Laconian by attribution; the find-spot is not in the open record we checked.
• Found outside Laconia Laconian work found abroad (traded in antiquity).

Objects acquired after 1970 without published documentation will not be shown. Disputed attributions are shown only with a warning.