In February of 2021, twenty-two ancient mosaics were found in Jersey City. Amphitrite holds on to Neptune as they emerge from the sea into Extra Storage Space on Mallory Avenue, gods sharing the cramped darkness of Unit 458 with preying animals, personified seasons, and Iphigenia making off with a statue of Artemis from her temple in Tauris.
These mosaics were the property of one Georges Lotfi. It was Lotfi who gave special agent Robert Mancene the keys, and pointed the way to more objects in storage in Teterboro.
As Lotfi explains it, “My target was to lend the pieces to various American museums in order to exhibit them temporarily.” Mancene thinks Lotfi wanted an inspection that would “permit him to sell or donate (for tax benefits) these otherwise unsalable items.”
Trained as a pharmacist, Lotfi has diagnosed himself with “collectionitis.” He says it is acute. Born in Tripoli in 1940, his collecting began in the 1960s. Over the years, he bought ancient funerary sculptures from Cyrene (Libya) and Palmyra (Syria), as well as Roman and Byzantine mosaics from Syria and Lebanon.
Lotfi is named as the first modern owner of this sixth-century beauty labelled “Foundation.” She hangs in the Met, nowadays without the company of a bull’s head from Sidon (Lebanon). Excavated at the Phoenician Temple of Eshmun in 1967 and stolen from a Byblos warehouse by armed Phalangists in 1981, the head was seized from the Met in 2017. Lotfi owned it at some point in the 1980s.
During the Lebanese Civil War, Lotfi shipped his mosaics to New York to keep them safe. Some were used to decorate the walls of his pied-à-terre on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met.
He says he purchased five of the New Jersey mosaics in Lebanon from the “well-known licensed dealer” Farid Ziadeh. It seems it was Ziadeh’s collector father who bought some of the mosaics in northern Syria in 1969. Ziadeh sold them on to Lotfi in 1985. Lotfi recounts: “I remember that his dining room was a display of antiques spread on the tables and floor.” One of the antiquities he got from Ziadeh’s dining room was the looted bull’s head.
Made of many small cubes of stone, ceramic or glass (called tesserae) laid in mortar, mosaics aren’t easily stolen. If “Foundation” holds a measuring rod, the attribute of the looter might be a canister of the glue used to keep a mosaic together as the floor is lifted from the ground.
Not just a collector, Lotfi also brought offerings to the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He once sketched for Mancene the various smuggling routes used by traffickers, and gave him a collection of blurry photographs of mosaics seemingly being looted. (According to Mancene, Lotfi kept them in a folder helpfully named “looted.”) A few capture the feet of a supposed looter or two. As Mancene writes:
It is well-documented that looters and traffickers often take and maintain photographs of an antiquity in its post-looting (pre-restoration) state to demonstrate the antiquity's authenticity to potential buyers in the future. The traffickers' oft-repeated refrain is that if it is dirty, it is real.
Some of Lotfi’s photographs show dirt on the mosaics discovered in New Jersey. He is now wanted by Interpol for the criminal possession of stolen property. Seized in 2021, his mosaics were repatriated to Lebanon in 2023.
Back in Lebanon himself, Lotfi denies any wrongdoing: “The photos that Mancene refers to are all montage photos.” He announces, “My next project would be a publication on fake mosaics and the technique of the forgers.”
After Mancene’s visit to Jersey City, Lotfi told officials that a number of his mosaics were in fact “modern copies.” Across the country, the Californian owner of a seized Syrian Hercules mosaic has made similar claims, saying he imported it “as trash.”
In Lotfi’s case, the art historian Djamila Fellague has come forward to say that she agrees with him. She’s found the mosaic of Amphitrite and Neptune to look much like one in the Louvre from a fourth-century house in Constantine (Algeria). Here the copyist has taken over the whole, watery scene, but in another Jersey City mosaic, just one giant was picked out of a Gigantomachy in Sicily. Other Lotfi floors appear to borrow the decoration around a figure of “Restoration” from a building in Antioch (Turkey). Fakes with faked looting photographs.
Experts debate whether ancient mosaicists worked from illustrated papyri to reproduce designs from one job to the next. Working from photographs, modern forgers use ancient tesserae to make their fakes at least materially real. Excavated mosaics are often pieced back together, their gaps sometimes filled with modern tesserae before they are put on display. The “Foundation” fragment in the Met was once in two parts, and Lotfi’s mosaic of a gladiator has a repaired shoulder. A mosaic that looks too intact can arouse suspicion.
We’ve come late to the Roman party in this little-discussed mosaic. One study describes it as “extraordinary and exceptionally well-preserved” and wonders about its authenticity.1 Sold by Farid Ziadeh in 1982, the mosaic is on display at the Château de Boudry in Switzerland, on deposit from a private collection. It is also up for sale, ready to grace the dining room of someone new.
The fowl course has just begun on the floor. Nine banqueters are squeezed into forced conviviality on the same couch. Some look intently at the large birds on small tables in front of them; one has had enough already and nodded off. A servant lights a lamp, and two more mix the drinks, as a cat and mouse scrounge what fishy scraps they can. Strewn across the black floor are the remnants of all-you-can-eat surf and turf.
Pliny writes of a famous work by the mosaicist Sosos,
who laid what is called the asarotos oikos or unswept room, because on the pavement were represented the débris of a meal, and those things which are normally swept away, as if they had been left there.2
Sosos’ floor is lost, but there are other unswept rooms, with shells and bones, fish heads and chicken feet represented in the bits and pieces of Roman villa floors that remain in Tunisia and Italy. In the famous (restored) mosaic by Heraklitos from a second-century dining room, scattered food waste casts illusionistic shadows on the white floor.
Later artists picked up this idea, littering their mosaic floors with soda cans, chocolate wrappers, and discarded tropical fruit. Having seen Heraklitos’ floor in Rome, Mags Harries lay bronze groceries into the concrete beneath the pushcart vendors of Boston’s Haymarket.
Over the course of a busy day, rubbish falls onto its representation, as refuse from a big meal would have dropped onto the asarotos oikos mosaics in ancient dining rooms.
To walk through a grand Roman house was to encounter a series of teasing deceptions, in one room standing on water, in another enveloped by a garden of fruit trees or pushed into the crowd at a theatre. Before a meal one might see its unsightly end. Finished and full, there could be many courses to go.
A tessellated banquet still waits on the floor of a third-century dining room from the House of the Buffet Supper in Daphne (Turkey). Artichokes, eggs, and trotters are just the appetiser.
Mosaics offer us a surfeit of options: real, fake, and things in between. We need only worry about our eyes being fooled, and how to sort through the mess.