The Ifergan Gallery's Phoenician Collection
The Ifergan Collection is one of the foremost private archaeological collections in the world, assembled by Vicente Jimenez Ifergan, who began collecting antiquities aged 17 and opened the Ifergan Gallery in Malaga city centre in 2018. This small ancient art museum is most remarkable for its Malaka Hall that houses a unique collection of Phoenician votive terracotta figures dating from the 6th to 4th centuries BC.
Discovered in a shipwreck off the coast of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, these memorial statues portray the faces of deceased male and female Phoenicians of all ages and classes, each with their right hand raised and palm facing outward in a gesture of blessing and protection. The collection also includes a number of ‘Tritons’, half-fish and half-man sculptures, representing the son of Poseidon, a sacred symbol for a seafaring civilization.
The Phoenicians onboard were apparently fleeing their homeland to escape the climax of the siege of Tyre by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and were possibly heading to Malaka (Malaga) loaded with treasures from the temples of the major Phoenician deities Melqart and Astarte when they sank. An alternative theory is that the figures were votive offerings to the gods thrown into the sea by Tyrians over hundreds of years.
More than 100 of these strikingly well-preserved sculptures are on display at the Ifergan Gallery, which is all down to the owner’s relentless drive to bring the contents of the shipwreck together, given that the pieces were originally sold to various individual collectors after the accidental discovery of a terracotta figure in the waters off Tyre by a Lebanese fisherman in 1958.
The collection is beautifully presented in an atmospheric black-walled room with a narrated video in both Spanish and English providing context. The Ifergan Collection has been hailed as one of the most important Phoenician discoveries of all time, and it seems entirely fitting that these enchanting sculpted figures finally reached the safety of their destination in Malaga 2,500 years after setting sail.