Chasing Aphrodite
Authors: Jason Felch
The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum
Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Table of Contents
10. A HOME IN THE GREEK ISLANDS
12. THE GETTY'S LATEST TREASURE
14. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING
19. THE APRIL FOOLS' DAY INDICTMENT
20. LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON
â¢
NEW YORK
2011
Copyright © 2011 by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Felch, Jason.
Chasing Aphrodite: the hunt for looted antiquities at the world's
richest museum / Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.
p. cm.
ISBN
978-0-15-101501-6
1. Classical antiquitiesâDestruction and pillage. 2. Cultural propertyâ
RepatriationâItaly. 3. Cultural propertyâRepatriationâCaliforniaâMalibu.
4. J. Paul Getty MuseumâCorrupt practices. I. Frammolino, Ralph. II. Title.
CC
135.
F
46 2011
930âdc22 2010025835
Book design by Victoria Hartman
Printed in the United States of America
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Photo credits appear on
[>]
.
ContentsFor Nico
âJ.F.For Allyson and Anna
âR.F.
P
ROLOGUE
[>]
Part I ⢠Windfalls and Cover-ups
1. T
HE
L
OST
B
RONZE
[>]
2. A P
ERFECT
S
CHEME
[>]
3. T
OO
M
ORAL
[>]
4. W
ORTH THE
P
RICE
[>]
5. A
N
A
WKWARD
D
EBUT
[>]
6. T
HE
W
INDBLOWN
G
ODDESS
[>]
7. T
HE
C
ULT OF
P
ERSEPHONE
[>]
Part II ⢠The Temptation of Marion True
8. T
HE
A
PTLY
N
AMED
D
R
. T
RUE
[>]
9. T
HE
F
LEISCHMAN
C
OLLECTION
[>]
10. A H
OME IN THE
G
REEK
I
SLANDS
[>]
11. C
ONFORTI'S
M
EN
[>]
12. T
HE
G
ETTY'S
L
ATEST
T
REASURE
[>]
13. F
OLLOW THE
P
OLAROIDS
[>]
14. A W
OLF IN
S
HEEP'S
C
LOTHING
[>]
Part III ⢠"After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?
"
15. T
ROUBLESOME
D
OCUMENTS
[>]
16. M
OUNTAINS AND
M
OLEHILLS
[>]
17. R
OGUE
M
USEUMS
[>]
18. T
HE
R
EIGN OF
M
UNITZ
[>]
19. T
HE
A
PRIL
F
OOLS'
D
AY
I
NDICTMENT
[>]
20. L
IFESTYLES OF THE
R
ICH AND
F
AMOUS
[>]
21. T
RUE
B
ELIEVERS
[>]
22. A B
RIGHT
L
INE
[>]
E
PILOGUE:
B
EYOND
O
WNERSHIP
[>]
Acknowledgments
[>]
Notes
[>]
Further Reading
[>]
Index
[>]
I
N RECENT YEARS,
several of America's leading art museums have given up some of their finest pieces of classical art, handing over more than one hundred Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities to the governments of Italy and Greece. The monetary value of the returned objects has been estimated at more than half a billion dollars. The aesthetic loss to the nation's art collections is immeasurable. Several of the objects have long been hailed as the defining masterpieces of their era. Yet for the most part, the museums gave up these ancient sculptures, vases, and frescoes under no legal obligation and with no promise of compensation. After decades of painstaking collecting, why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity?
The returns followed an international scandal that exposed an ugly truth, something art insiders had long known but publicly denied. For decades, museums in America, Europe, and elsewhere had been buying recently looted objects from a criminal underworld of smugglers and fences, in violation of U.S. and foreign law.
The museum world's dirty little secret came to light amid revelations about pedophile priests in the Catholic Church and widespread steroid use in major league baseball. Like those scandals, the truth about museums and lootingâdocumented in blurry Polaroids and splashed across newspapers around the worldâredefined some of America's most cherished institutions in the public mind. Museums have long been our civic temples, places to worship beauty and the diversity of the world's cultures. Now they are also recognized as multimillion-dollar showcases for stolen property.
The crime in question, trafficking in looted art, is hardly new. Indeed, it is probably the world's second-oldest profession. One of the earliest known legal documents is an Egyptian papyrus dating to 1100
B.C.
that chronicles the trial of several men caught robbing the tombs of pharaohs. (The document resides not in Egypt, of course, but in London, after being "acquired" by the British Museum in the 1880s.) The Romans sacked Greece; Spain plundered the New World; Napoleon filled the Louvre with booty taken from across his empire. In the eighteenth century, caravans of British aristocrats on the grand tour blithely plucked what they wanted from ancient sites, sending home wagonloads of ancient art for their country estates.
This long parade of plunder has occasionally been interrupted by outcry and debate. In 70
B.C.
, a sharp-tongued Roman attorney named Cicero summoned all his oratorical skills to press a criminal case against the corrupt governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, whose wholesale sacking of temples, private homes, and public monuments bordered on kleptomania.
"In all Sicily, in all that wealthy and ancient province ... there was no silver vessel, no Corinthian or Delian plate, no jewel or pearl, nothing made of gold or ivory, no statue of marble or brass or ivory, no picture whether painted or embroidered, that he did not seek out, that he did not inspect, that, if he liked it, he did not take away," Cicero told the Roman Senate. Looting was "what Verres calls his passion; what his friends call his disease, his madness; what the Sicilians call his rapine."
In 1816, more than eighteen hundred years later, a similar condemnation echoed throughout the halls of the British Parliament after Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, returned from Greece with shiploads of exquisitely carved friezes ripped from the Parthenon. The marbles represented the artistic zenith of ancient Greece and had survived for twenty-two centuries. Their removal represented the nadir of antiquities collecting. Even Britain's wealthy cognoscenti, men who had feasted on marble trophies from Greece and Rome for more than a century, recoiled at the magnitude of Lord Elgin's appetite. The most stinging rebuke flowed from the quill of Lord Byron, Elgin's contemporary and a great defender of Greek culture. In his poem "The Curse of Minerva," Byron gives voice to the goddess herself to denounce the intrepid collector:
I saw successive Tyrannies expire;
'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.
Britain eventually bought the marbles from Elgin and installed them in the British Museum, the first of the so-called encyclopedic museums. It was soon joined by the Louvre, the National Museums in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these repositories of human achievement accumulated some of the world's most celebrated works of art, many of which might otherwise have been lost. The museums pioneered new ways to protect and conserve them and spent millions building palatial galleries in which to display them. They saw themselves as products of the Enlightenment, brick-and-mortar extensions of Diderot's
Encyclopédie.
But they were also the products of colonialism, driven to collect by a sense of cultural superiority that justified the unchecked acquisition of relics from the far reaches of their empires.
In America, this attitude prevailed well into the postâWorld War II boom years, when prosperity gave rise to a new class of regional museums and nouveau riche art enthusiasts who adopted the role of the enlightened collector. Many sought to make their mark in the niche of classical antiquities, which conveyed instant prestige and seemed to yield a never-ending supply of new masterpieces.
The sudden demand for antiquities fueled looting as never before, not just in Mediterranean countries but also across Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. What had long been a small market in trinkets for tourists rapidly became a sophisticated global supply chain. Illegal excavations destroyed archaeological sitesâand the historical record they containedâat a staggering pace.
The destruction coincided with the changing Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Archaeologically rich countries found a new appreciation for their antiquities, which offered a connection to a glorious past. These so-called source countries began dusting off long-forgotten laws that asserted state ownership of their cultural patrimony, including any undiscovered archaeological finds within their modern borders. The efforts came in fits and starts and were easily dismissed by collectors and museums. But they found a sympathetic following among archaeologists, who saw firsthand the ravages of looting. Scholars began to trace the paths of looted objects from plundered grave sites to the shelves of local museums.
The crisis culminated in 1970 with a landmark international treaty for the protection of cultural property brokered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The UNESCO Convention sought to stop the illicit flow of artifacts by weaving together a loose patchwork of national patrimony laws into a seamless net. The United States and more than one hundred other countries eventually signed the accord, agreeing to restrict the importation of illicit objects. In doing so, they recognized that an antiquity's value lay not just in its intrinsic beauty but also in its archaeological contextâwhere it was found and how it related to those surroundings.
The treaty was hailed as a paradigm shift. The great collecting museums in America and Europe publicly supported it, with Thomas Hoving, then director of the mighty Met, declaring, "The Age of Piracy is over."
But in truth, UNESCO changed very little. For the past forty years, museum officials have routinely violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the UNESCO treaty and foreign and domestic laws, buying ancient art they knew had been illegally excavated and spirited out of source countries.
Their actions amounted to a massive betrayal of museums' public mission. To educate the public and preserve the past, white-gloved curators did business with the most corrupt corners of the art world, cutting deals in Swiss bank vaults and smugglers' warehouses with the criminal underclass that controlled the market. They bought objects laundered through auction houses and private collections, acceptingâand at times inventingâfake ownership histories that covered criminal origins with falsehoods that to this day obscure the historical record. In doing so, museums have fueled the destruction of far more knowledge than they have preserved, all while ostensibly deploring the havoc that looting wreaks on archaeological sites, our primary source of knowledge about our origins.
For the Age of Piracy to truly end, it took an international scandal of remarkable proportions. At the center of that scandal was the upstart J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. No institution struggled with the morality of buying looted antiquities more deeply than the Getty. And in the end, none paid a higher price.
