Director Maximilian Davis’s second campaign as the house’s newly appointed director features models donning sleek Ferragamo clothes before backdrops printed with Italian paintings from the Uffizi’s collection. In a statement announcing the Uffizi collaboration, Davis said, “The Renaissance is hardwired into Florence.”

Works from the 15th and 16th centuries were among the scenes that appeared in his images for Ferragamo. Models were posed in front of canonical subjects: Italian nobles, biblical figures, and Tuscan landscapes visible in works like Botticelli’s The Annunciation of San Martino alla Scala (1481) and Piero della Francesca’s Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (1467–72). At various points, Mitchell also serves as a model.

Over the past few years, Mitchell has gained a following for his imagery that have centered Black subjects, ranging from the famous to unrecognized. In 2020, Mitchell joined the roster of Jack Shainman Gallery; he was just 25 at the time. Not long beforehand, he’d been the subject of a traveling museum exhibition that opened at the Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and traveled to New York at the International Center of Photography in 2019.

Mitchell’s work has collapsed divisions between the worlds of fashion and art. In 2021, Mitchell told Art in America that he leans on his background in filmmaking to inform his art and commercial projects, saying, “I think of myself as basically a director.”

The 16-page letter, dated to July 23, accuses Black, former Museum of Modern Art chairman, of  withholding information regarding his dealings with Epstein. 

“As you are aware, the Committee is investigating the $158 million in payments you made to Epstein for services related to a variety of tax and estate planning matters. In particular, the Committee seeks information on Epstein’s participation in structuring trusts and other complex transactions designed to avoid federal gift and estate taxes on as much as $2 billion in wealth transferred to your children,” the letter reads. The committee also requested more information involving Epstein’s “extraordinary compensation scheme, which involved amounts that far exceeded those paid to other professional advisors” employed by Black.

A spokesperson for Black told Artnet News in an emailed statement: “Mr. Black has cooperated extensively with the Committee, providing detailed information about the matters under review. The transactions referenced in the Committee’s letter were lawful in all respects, were conceived of, vetted and implemented by reputable law firms and tax and other advisors, and Mr. Black has fully paid all taxes owed to the government.”

At the center of the investigation is Black’s art holdings, the management of which, Wyden writes, received “substantial advice” from Epstein. Toward the end of the letter, Wyden notes that in a briefing to the committee on August 1, 2022, Black’s outside counsel “indicated that Epstein provided substantial advice related to your private art collection, which is worth over $1 billion.”

“This advice reportedly included helping you form a new art partnership as well as assistance in connection with the sale of certain pieces of artwork,” reads the letter. Wyden also requests more information on the “purpose” of the new art partnership, as well as “any art loans that involved Epstein, including Epstein’s role related to those loans.”

Finally, he asked for a list of “any like-kind exchange transactions” involving artworks valued at over $1 million. A “like-kind” exchange—or a “1031,” a term named after a tax provision in the Internal Revenue Code—allows investors to defer capital gain taxes by using the proceeds from the sale of like-valued assets held for investment purposes.

The provision was popular with art flippers looking to dodge the high capital gains rate (28 percent) that blue-chip artworks occur. Congress killed 1031 exchanges as they apply to art in 2018. Wyden asked for a detailed breakdown of each like-kind exchange transaction between Black and Epstein. 

Wyden’s letter was sent shortly after the embattled collector finalized a deal with the US Virgin Islands— where Epstein conducted most of his sordid business—to avoid a potential lawsuit over his dealings with Epstein. The New York Times reported that Black agreed to pay $62.5 million to the US Virgin Islands in January 2023 to settle claims that may arise during the territory’s investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Black’s settlement came after the Virgin Islands struck a $105 million deal in November 2022 with Epstein’s estate.

Enger loved crime. As a child he was obsessed with two things. The first was Frances Ford Coppola’s mobster epic The Godfather. At 15, he even used his ill gotten money to fly to New York City and see where the film was made. The second was Edvard Munch’s haunting work The Scream. So, in 1994, he stole it.

But, according to a recently released documentary available to watch on Sky Now, The Man Who Stole The Scream, that wasn’t the first time Enger had committed a crime. Enger grew up in Oslo’s Tveita neighborhood, the epicenter of crime in Norway’s capital city and home of the Tveitagjengen, which dealt in everything from robbery to murder.

After shoplifting sweets from local stores as a boy, Enger graduated to more sophisticated, and malicious, types of crime: robbing jewelry shops, cracking safes at night, and blowing up ATMs, according to the Sun. His former teammate Erik Fosse told the Athletic he would never take the subway into the city, instead opting to steal a Porsche, Mercedes, or BMW and drive in. 

He first saw The Scream in school. To him, it was the oil and canvas version of the trauma he suffered at the hands of a violent stepfather and a brutal neighborhood. Stealing the work would be the culmination of his criminal life. But it wasn’t the first time he’d stolen a painting by his fellow Norwegian. 

In 1988 Enger’s star was rising on the soccer pitch. “He was very talented,” Dag Vestlund, Valerenga’s manager at the time, told the Athletic. “He was small, quick, tough. I liked him a lot. He was always very well behaved in my dealings with him. Always polite, very humble.” Still, he decided to show the world what he was capable of, not on the grass but in the shadows. He decided to steal The Scream from Oslo’s National Gallery. Along with his friend Bjorn Grytdal, with whom he’d committed many of his early crimes, he carefully planned the heist.

Their plan wasn’t perfect. A miscalculation landed them squarely in front of Munch’s Vampire. So they stole that instead.

“The disappointment lasted days,” Enger said, “but then it started to become fun.” For a while they hid the painting in the ceiling of a pool hall Enger had bought that had become a local hang out for off-duty police. “‘They don’t know it’s hanging just one meter from them,” Enger said, “That was the best feeling. We let them play for free just to have them there.”

Unfortunately for him, Grytdal told a neighbor, who turned out to be a confidential informant, about the heist and soon police barged into Enger’s home, where Vampire was hanging on the wall.

He served a four-year prison sentence for stealing Vampire and his soccer career slipped away. But he wasn’t done. When he was released, in 1992, The Scream’s swirling orange, red, and blue sky was still on his mind. 

On February 12, 1994, the world was focused on the opening ceremonies of that year’s Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, just two hours away by car. Enger seized the opportunity, knowing that most of Oslo’s police had been diverted north to secure the massive event.

Enger enlisted the help of a homeless man, William Aasheim, who undertook the same smash and grab Enger himself had undergone a few years before while he stayed at home with his wife. Aasheim and an accomplice used a ladder to climb up to a window at the National Gallery, smashed it open, and climbed inside. Ninety seconds later, The Scream was gone.

“The National Gallery had no security,” Leif Lier, the chief investigator for Oslo police, told the Athletic. “You could just break a window to go in and get the painting. They had a few surveillance cameras, but this was 1994 and the images were really blurry.”

Enger reveled in the fact that, despite being a suspect, police couldn’t link him to the crime. A few weeks after the heist, his first son was born, and Enger took out an ad in the newspaper saying his son, Oscar, was born “with a scream.” He also called in countless anonymous tips claiming he had the painting in his car. When police would stop him and search the vehicle, they’d come up empty, to Enger’s delight.

That revelry didn’t last long. Enger, through the art dealer Einar-Tore Ulving, attempted to fence the painting. At an Oslo hotel, Ulving met with a man who claimed to be an art dealer from the Getty Museum, but in actuality was an officer from Scotland Yard named Charley Hill.

Ulving demanded around $400,000 for the $150 million painting. Hill agreed and the two drove to Aasgardstrand, a small village south of Oslo, to retrieve The Scream from a cellar. Ulving quickly was arrested, and soon after, so was Aasheim.

Enger grabbed his infant son, strapped the boy to his chest, and drove away from his home with a gun in his hand. Police followed him to a gas station where he was ambushed before anything got out of hand. He was eventually changed with “gun offenses” and, despite the initial lack of evidence, the theft of The Scream. He was sentenced to six years in prison, the longest sentence in Norway’s history for a such a crime.

In prison, Enger learned to paint and now claims people line up to buy his work. Norway’s copy of The Scream (Munch made four versions), now hangs at the new National Museum, which opened last year and cost $630 million, a building Enger claims they built “because of him.”

Looking back at his life, Enger said he might have done a few things differently. But he has no regrets about stealing The Scream. “I made history and it’s a cool story. Movies are made about things like that. This wasn’t a movie. This was real life.”

This week, Ittai Gradel, a Dutch antiquities dealer, said he had told the British Museum about the thefts two years ago and claimed that his allegations had gone unheeded.

Fischer previously claimed that he took Gradel’s allegations “seriously.” In a statement issued on Friday, Fischer changed his tune.

“Over the last few days I have been reviewing in detail the events around the thefts from the British Museum and the investigation into them,” Fischer wrote in a press statement. “It is evident that the British Museum did not respond as comprehensively as it should have in response to the warnings in 2021, and to the problem that has now fully emerged. The responsibility for that failure must ultimately rest with the Director. I also misjudged the remarks I made earlier this week about Dr Gradel. I wish to express my sincere regret and withdraw those remarks.

“The situation facing the Museum is of the utmost seriousness,” Fischer continued. “I sincerely believe it will come through this moment and emerge stronger, but sadly I have come to the conclusion that my presence is proving a distraction. That is the last thing I would want. Over the last seven years I have been privileged to work with some of the most talented and dedicated public servants. The British Museum is an amazing institution, and it has been the honour of my life to lead it.”

Fischer also said he offered his resignation to the Chairman of the Trustees, and would step down as soon as the institution’s board of trustees have established an interim leadership arrangement. The museum said its the board has accepted Fischer’s decision.

His resignation followed the museum’s announcement on August 16 of missing, stolen, and damaged items from its collection, an independent review of its security protocols, and a staff member being dismissed as a result.

News reports identified the fired staff member as veteran Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs, who had taken “more than 1,500 items.” Antiquities had reportedly been listed on the e-commerce platform eBay for as little as $51.

Several hours after Fischer announced he would be immediately stepping down, the museum also sent out a statement that deputy director Jonathan Williams “has agreed to voluntarily step back from his normal duties until the independent review into the thefts at the Museum has concluded. This will happen with immediate effect.”

Reports from the BBC News, The New York Times and The Telegraph said Gradel had also contacted Williams, trustee Paul Ruddock, and board chairman George Osbourne in 2021 about his concerns of items from the museum’s collection were being listed on eBay. However, Williams replied to Gradel by email that a “thorough investigation” had found “no suggestion of any wrongdoing”, adding that the institution’s “collection is protected”.

On August 25, Osbourne also released a statement about Fischer’s decision to step down immediately, calling the situation a “turbulent period” and emphasizing the institution’s intention “to fix what has gone wrong”. The former Chancellor of the UK government has not received the same calls to resign from his position as Fischer or Williams.

As a result of the scandal, officials from Nigeria and Greece pressed once more for the British Museum to repatriate the institution’s Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Marbles due to questions about their security and safety.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

It has been widely reported that New York–based collector Candace Carmel Barasch had taken legal action against Schiff, beginning in May, in two separate lawsuits, in which Barasch claimed that she had been defrauded by Schiff. In one of those suits, Barasch alleged that she had provided $6.6 million to Schiff for the purchases of artworks; those pieces never came in, Barasch claimed, because Schiff had diverted the funds. In the other, Barasch and collector Richard Grossman accused Schiff of still owing them $1.8 million in relation to the private sale of an Adrian Ghenie painting at Sotheby’s.

But a document filed on August 11 by Douglas J. Pick, the person Schiff appointed to liquidate her firm, shows that they are not the only ones who have pending claims against Schiff. The others include the director of sales at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery and Sotheby’s private sales department, both for amounts that were not disclosed. The artist Seffa Klein, who had an exhibition at Schiff’s SFA Art Advisory prior to its closure, has also filed a claim for $506,200.50.

Thomas Hagerty, the managing directory of the private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners, and his wife Jeanne filed a claim for “at least $990,000,” and Brian and Karen Conway, who have galleries named after them at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where Karen is a trustee, filed a claim for “not less than $611,500.00.”

Whereas the details of the Barasch claim are known because of the lawsuits she filed, the details of these claims are not known because they went unspecified.

Yet other documents filed this month did reveal other specifics related to Schiff that were previously unknown—including the many artworks that are allegedly still missing.

According to the Winston Art Group, the advisory firm selected by Pick to inventory Schiff’s company, there are 108 artworks whose whereabouts are still unknown by artists such as Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Virgil Abloh, Jana Euler, Alex Israel, Joel Mesler, Ugo Rondinone, Julie Mehretu, and Lisa Edelstein, an actress who has previously produced art and is a friend of Schiff.

It is worth noting that many of these works are works on paper or editioned objects, meaning that their individual values are likely far lower than unique artworks like the Ghenie painting in the Barasch lawsuit. However, the Winston Art Group pegged their collective value at $1.13 million.

The Winston Art Group also filed another document in which it said there was more than $3 million worth of artworks that were still being held by Schiff. Among the 894 works allegedly in her possession were ones by artists ranging from Jeffrey Gibson to DIS to Laura Owens to Wade Guyton.

The Baer Faxt newsletter first reported news of the newly filed documents on Thursday.

The Headlines

JOB POSTINGS. The Museum of the Moving Image in New York picked as its leader Aziz Isham, the director of the arts nonprofit Twenty Summers, the New York Times reports. Isham follows Carl Goodman in the role, and he wants to have the institution focus more on areas like video games and social media. ● Didier Fusillier has been tapped by the French government to lead the body that operates the Grand Palais (the home of Paris+ par Art Basel) and the Musée du Luxembourg, the Art Newspaper reports. A veteran arts administrator, Fusillier succeeds Chris Dercon, who departed the job to become managing director at the Fondation Cartier. ● TAN also reports that United Talent Agency has named Harrison Tenzer, formerly head of digital strategy for Sotheby’s, to run its fine art and artist space divisions in New York, where it will stage a pop-up next month. It currently has locations in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

ARCHAEOLOGY DEPARTMENT. Increased rain and flooding along the Silk Road in northwestern China in recent years has been damaging paintings made by followers of Buddhism in the Mogao Caves more than 1,500 years ago, All Things Considers reports. The nation “has invested considerably on restoration work of the cave paintings,” reporter Emily Feng notes. Over in Northern Peru, Reuters reports, researchers believe that a nearly 10-foot-tall polychrome wall discovered by farmers mid-harvest in 2020 dates back some four millennia. They think that it may have been part of a temple, and if that is the case, excavation work is likely to reveal a hearth at the site.

The Digest

Following a 2022 break-in during which works from its collection were smashed, the Dallas Museum of Art requested $36 million to upgrade its security system. Dallas officials are set to propose $11.5 million for that, as part of a bond package that will go before voters next year. [The Dallas Morning News]

As litigation continues against art adviser Lisa Schiff, who allegedly failed to pay clients, new documents are offering glimpses of her operations. An inventory of her holdings by an outside firm identified almost 900 pieces worth more than $3.1 million. Schiff has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing. [The Art Newspaper]

The U.S. Senate Finance Committee is pressing collector Leon Black for more information on his $158 million payment to Jeffrey Epstein for tax and estate planning. A rep for Black said he has “cooperated extensively with the Committee, providing detailed information about the matters under review,” and paid all relevant taxes. [Artnet News]

KAWS, aka Brian Donnelly, will make his Canadian museum debut next month at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Featuring more than 70 artworks, the show is titled “Kaws: Family.” [HypeArt/Hypebeast]

Artist Tomashi Jackson has won the annual Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which honors an area artist with $50,000. Jackson will show with Night Gallery in Los Angeles later this year. [The Boston Globe]

Reporter Wendy Hurrell caught up with a U.K. husband and wife whose hobby is visiting outdoor art trails—those sculpture displays that dot various locales. They do around five trails a year, and so far have hit 44. [BBC News]

The Kicker

THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. A master’s student in forensic art at the University of Dundee in Scotland, Barbora Veselá, has produced a detailed recreation of the face of Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, the New York Times reports. Her sources? Photos of the Young Chevalier’s death mask, accounts from his time, and other depictions him that are believed to be accurate. Did he deserve his handsome nickname? “I don’t think he’s bad looking,” Veselá told the Times. “I just think that beauty is very subjective, and we definitely have different beauty standards than they would have in the 18th century.” Click to decide for yourself. [NYT]

He died within months of his mother, the artist Françoise Gilot, who passed away in June at 101, and during the 50th anniversary commemorations of the death of his father, whose work is the subject of numerous museum exhibitions around the world right now. (Among their survivors are Gilot’s daughter, Paloma Picasso.)

In his capacity as the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, a position he held from 1989 to earlier this year, Claude worked alongside his father’s many descendants to steward the artist’s legacy. The business was not always smooth sailing, as conflicts between members of the Picasso family periodically arose in public-facing ways.

Before Pablo Picasso had even died, in 1970, Claude, then aged 22, sued in France to be recognized as the legitimate son of his father, which would officially make Claude an heir. A court eventually ruled in his and his sister Paloma’s favor, making them legal heirs to Picasso four years later, after the artist had died in 1973.

It was the first in a number of internal battles among the Picasso family that would unfold across the next few decades. Many of those conflicts pitted Claude against other of Picasso’s heirs, including his second wife Jacqueline Roque; his half-sister Maya Widmaier-Picasso, whose mother was Marie-Thérèse Walter; and Picasso’s grandchildren Marina Picasso and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, the children of the artist’s eldest son, Paul Picasso, via his first wife Olga Khokhlova.

The most explosive standoff took place in 1999, when Claude sold the Picasso name and signature to PSA Peugeot-Citroen, which released car titled after the artist. Marina sued Claude, claiming that he had disrespected “one of the greatest painters, a genius.” Queried about the situation, Claude’s lawyer told the Guardian: “Claude Ruiz Picasso is recognised by a majority of the five surviving heirs as being perfectly entitled to exploit the Picasso brand name.”

In interviews, Claude said he never thought he would play such a role. “I never expected or desired to have any kind of role like this, or have any influence over my father’s legacy,” he once told Picasso biographer John Richardson. Speaking of his late brother, he added, “Paul also said, shortly before he died, ‘You know, if we’re in the shit we’re in, it’s all your fault.'”

Claude Picasso was born in 1947. He studied in England and France, and went on to live in New York between 1967 and 1974. He was briefly an assistant to the famed photographer Richard Avedon; he became a photojournalist himself.

In 1989, Claude became the court-appointed administrator of the Picasso estate, Succession Picasso. Through the role, he controlled the use of Picasso’s copyright. He held the position until July, when his sister Paloma took over.

He could be ornery about his father’s legacy. In 2018, he once said that a good amount of Picasso shows are “not necessary” and that Paris’s Musée Picasso was doing too much lending. He said that many works in the collection were not in a position to travel as frequently as they did it and that the “tsunami” of exhibitions taking place include many which are “nondescript and do nothing more than surf on the magic of a great name.”

Among the exhibitions this year to have feature loans from that museum is the negatively reviewed “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Yet Claude also seemed to take great pride in his work for the estate. “There’s still a lot to learn from Picasso,” he told Richardson.

Dealer Larry Gagosian said in a statement, “He was a dedicated guardian and interpreter of his father’s legacy, leading the Picasso Administration since its founding and enthusiastically supporting international scholarship and exhibitions. He was an extraordinary man and a great friend. Our hearts go out to all of Claude’s family. He will be profoundly missed.”

“It’s shocking to hear that the countries and museums that have been telling us that the Benin Bronzes would not be secure in Nigeria, have thefts happening there,” the director of Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Abba Isa Tijani, told Sky News.

On August 16, the British Museum announced that a former employee was responsible for the small pieces of “gold jewelry and gems of semi-precious stones and glass dating from the 15th century BC to the 19th century” that had disappeared in increments from its collection. The press release did not name the fired staff member, but two UK media outlets identified them as veteran Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs.

The institution has come under intense scrutiny after reports that the stolen items total “more than 1,500”, and were listed on the e-commerce website eBay for as little as $51. Additionally, it was revealed that senior officials were emailed detailed warnings about the thefts in 2021.

The Benin Bronzes are brass and bronze artifacts, some dating to the 16th century, that were removed from the West African kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria) after British forces invaded in 1897. The British Museum has a particularly large collection of “elaborately decorated cast plaques, commemorative heads, animal and human figures, items of royal regalia, and personal ornaments”, with over 900 objects and more than 100 on rotating display in its galleries.

Tijani stressed that the Benin Bronzes were illegally taken from Benin and deposited in the London museum. “It is irrespective whether they are safe there…The issue is that these are stolen artifacts, and they should be returned to Nigeria to the communities that they belong to.”

While the British Museum’s website says it has “positive relationships with the royal palace in Benin City and with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM)”, it acknowledges that the museum received a written request for their return from Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Information and Culture in October 2021.

In the interview with Sky News, Tijani also said Hannatu Musawa, Nigeria’s newly appointed minister of Arts, Culture and Creative Economy, planned to directly request the immediate repatriation of the contested artifacts.

Tijani’s comments follow recent comments from Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni about the security of another contested group of artifacts, the Parthenon Marbles. “When such incidents occur, there is obviously a question of safety and integrity [around] all of the museum’s exhibits,” she told the Greek newspaper To Vima .

The exterior columns of the Corridor, a nearly 500-year-old passageway along the river Arno between the Uffizi’s Palazzo Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti, was tagged with graffiti related to the Munich soccer club in the early morning hours of August 23. According to CNN, the two alleged vandals were part of a group of 11 German tourists who were staying at an Airbnb in the center of Florence.

The two suspects were arrested after the Carabinieri raided their Airbnb, where they found two cans of black spray paint and paint-stained clothes. 

“Clearly this is not a drunken whim, but a premeditated act,’’ Uffizi director Eike Schmidt said in a statement. Schmidt called for severe punishment of the suspects, adding that in the United States similar crimes can carry a prison sentence of five years. “Enough with symbolic punishments and imaginative extenuating circumstances. We need the hard fist of the law.”

The vandals caused around $10,800 worth of damage to the Corridor, according to the Italian Ministry of Culture, and the repairs will be carried out under the protection of armed guards.

The Vasari Corridor was built by Giorgio Vasari, and Italian Renaissance painter and architect, in 1565. The one-kilometer-long structure was completed in less than 9 months. It was designed to serve as a secret route between the private family in the Boboli Gardens and the administrative offices of the then-head of the Medici family, Cosimo I de’Medici.

The tagging of the Vasari Corridor is the latest in a string of vandalism in Italy. Earlier this summer, a tourist was filmed carving his and his girlfriend’s names into a wall of the Colosseum in Rome, while in Milan the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II was defaced with graffiti.

A team of Australian scientists used radiocarbon dating to conduct what they have hailed as the first chronometric age study of Malaysian rock art. Their findings were first reported on Wednesday in the peer-reviewed science and medical journal PLOS One.

The study helps illuminate “the social contexts of the Gua Sireh art production, as well as the opportunities and challenges of dating rock art associated with the Malay/Austronesian diasporas in Southeast Asia more generally,” the team wrote.

The cave system is home to large charcoal drawings of human figures made by the Indigenous Bidayuh people of the Sarawak region, now known as Borneo. They paint a dramatic scene: the towering figures brandish knives or spears, and wear elaborate headdresses. The Bidayuh did not maintain a written record of their history, making the cave art a precious—if worn—guide to their varied (and tense) geopolitical position.

More than 300 images decorate the walls, however the team focused on two anthropomorphic figures: one, identified as GS3, has a round torso and wears what looks like a jagged cloak or long, plumed headpiece. The other figure, called GS4, has a triangular body and is sparsely adorned, save for the sheathed knife in their right hand. Smaller figures surround the pair, suggesting they may symbolize “big and/or powerful warriors”, according to the study.

The radiocarbon dating estimates GS3 was created between 1670-1710 while GS4 dates to 1800-1830.

“When the older anthropomorph was drawn, the Bidayuh were dominated by Malay elites, whereas the second large anthropomorph would have been made during a period of increasing conflict between Bidayuh and both Iban and Brunei Malay rulers,” the scientists wrote. “During this period many Indigenous Sarawakians moved into the upland interior, including the Gua Sireh area, to escape persecution.”

The study further posits that despite their approximately 160-year age gap, both artworks were likely produced during periods of conflict, given the prominence of weaponry and other battle adornments.

“The radiocarbon age determinations reported here sit neatly alongside other recently published numeric ages for the distinctive black drawings associated with the migration of Austronesian people across Southeast Asia,” the researchers said.

The Bidayuh people occupied present-day Borneo for some 2,000 years and, per historical records, flourished in relative autonomy until a 200-year period when the region was governed by Malay’s Brunei Sultanate. Per historical records, the Indigenous people suffered exploitation and violence under the long rule. During that period, Bidayuh tribes also clashed the Iban, another Indigenous group, over territory.

Researchers also pulled artifacts from the cave, which were used to corroborate their radiocarbon dating, as well as further illuminate histories of the Bidayuh and neighboring people. A group of artifacts from the Gua Sireh excavations are on display at the Sarawak State Museum in Kuching in Borneo.