Jean-Luc Martinez, born on March 22, 1964, is a French archaeologist and art historian specializing in ancient Greek sculpture.
Other projects initiated during his term include the "Petite Galerie" dedicated to the history of art, the "Studio" for training and welcoming priority audiences, and free evening openings on the first Saturday of each month.
The conservation center in Liévin, designed by Richard Rogers' firm, was inaugurated in October 2019 and houses 250,000 works from the Louvre.
His report "Shared Heritage: Universality, Restitution, and the Circulation of Artworks – Towards a French Legislation and Doctrine on 'Restitution Criteria' for Cultural Goods" was submitted in April 2023.
On May 23, 2022, Martinez was taken into custody as part of an antiquities trafficking case and was later indicted for "money laundering and complicity in organized fraud."
He was accused of failing to exercise due diligence concerning inconsistencies identified later in the certificates accompanying a pink granite stele inscribed with Pharaoh Tutankhamun's name, exhibited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and four other objects.
Antiquities expert Christophe Kunicki, who proposed the Tutankhamun stele to the Louvre Abu Dhabi acquisition committee in 2016, was allegedly involved in selling the golden sarcophagus of priest Nedjemankh to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which was returned to Egypt in 2019 after being stolen in 2011 during the Hosni Mubarak uprising.
He asserts that verifying the authenticity of provenance documents for artworks is not within his remit and criticizes the lack of resources available to museum directors for this purpose.