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Cesnola was born in
Italy in 1832. He had
a colorful military back-
ground fighting for
Sardinia in the First
Italian War of Indepen-
dence 1849-1854, then
with the British Army in
the Crimean War 1854-
1856 and finally for the
Union in the American
Civil War 1862-1865. In
the Civil War he was
colonel of the 4th New
York Cavalry Regiment and was wounded and taken prisoner at the
Battle of Aldie in 1863 and released in 1864. He received a Medal of
Honor for his efforts during the battle. After the war he was appointed
United States consul at Larnaca in Cyprus where he carried out
excavations starting in 1865. During the next few years he acquired a
mass collection of Cypriot antiquities never seen before. Cesnola saw his
work as rivaling that of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and intended his
discoveries on Cyprus to provide important evidence for the so-called
missing link between the biblical and classical worlds. In 1872 the col-
lection was purchased by the newly formed Metropolitan Museum of Art
and became one of the museum’s core collections. Cesnola followed the
collection back to New York so he could curate it and in 1879 he became
the museum’s first president until his death in 1904.
In 1916 Toledo Museum of Art purchased some 82 pieces from the
Cesnola Collection from the Met. The following letters between the
curators reveals this important transaction. You can find 50
pieces from the Cosnola collection listed in the following lots 19-68.
Luigi Palma di Cesnola