Chasing Aphrodite (39 page)

The Met agreement grabbed international headlines. It was hailed as a watershed event that offered a model resolution for the growing tensions between Italy and American museums. Only de Montebello could have returned such precious objects to Italy and not been denounced by his peers. There was no small irony in the fact that the hardest of hardliners in the American museum community was now being hailed as a hero, while Marion True—who a decade earlier had been scorned for proposing this very approach—was facing a criminal trial.

Despite the public praise, de Montebello privately regarded the deal as a betrayal of his curators and a black mark on his reputation. He flew back to the United States, where he put the finishing touches on the agreement via conference call while attending the Association of Art Museum Directors' midwinter meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida. After hanging up the phone, he went to eat alone at the Marriott. When an East Coast museum director came over to say hello, a gloomy de Montebello told him about the deal. "I know you're from a different generation," the Met boss said, "but I feel like I've let down my curators."

"Philippe, you've done a good thing for us," the other director said. "We needed to lance this boil."

When de Montebello walked into a conference room the next day, he received a standing ovation from his fellow museum directors. They cheered again after he outlined the agreement and explained his reasons for making it.

On February 21, de Montebello flew back to Rome, where he hoped to sign the deal with Itali an authorities and then quietly slip out of town. Before he could leave, however, the Italians had arranged for a photo opportunity to record the moment for posterity. The Met acknowledged the agreement with a perfunctory one-page press release. In a
New York Times
interview, de Montebello was unrepentant, saying that he had been forced to make the deal in order to rid the Met of "irritants" and "vexing issues." He accused the Itali ans of "shabby" conduct for leaking the evidence about the Euphronios krater to the press, conveniently glossing over how the Met had ignored Italy's more subtle requests for years. He expressed revulsion at the plunder of cultural monuments while at the same time crediting the black market for preserving many of the world's greatest art objects.

In a speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., two months later, de Montebello was even more strident. He heaped scorn on a few archaeological extremists who, he said, seemed to have captivated the media. He blamed the influx of looted antiquities in America on conniving dealers, while maintaining that museum curators—many of them with Ph.D.'s and archaeological experience themselves—had simply been duped. "Most staff at museums around the world acquiring works with doubtful provenance displayed not cupidity, if you will, but rather guilelessness in the face of very clever imposture and deception."

He also attacked those who were advocating the adoption of policies forbidding museums to buy antiquities that had appeared on the market without provenance after 1970. "That is not the high moral ground. That is a capitulation to a political agenda and a betrayal of a museum's basic mission and purpose, in this case the rescue and the preservation of objects of great aesthetic merit and intrinsic cultural significance," he said. "To simply and deliberately condemn innumerable worthy objects ... to the trash heap or oblivion, through redirecting the market to a true black market, to buyers less committed to openness, conservation, scholarship and certainly access—is wrong."

B
ACK IN LOS ANGELES,
Li's antiquities team continued poring over the Italians' photographic evidence, which appeared to support their demands for the return of twenty-one objects, including the griffins and the Apollo. (Li's team eventually found a twenty-second item that the Italians had missed.) The rest of the items on their list were "wobblers" or, as in the case of the Getty Bronze, not supported by the evidence.

Then there was the Aphrodite. The allegations in the Italians' dossier went back to Silvio Raffiotta's initial investigation and the rumors of a large statue having been found in Morgantina in 1979. There was also the more recent limestone test, which pointed to central Sicily as the source of the stone. The evidence amounted to a compelling circumstantial case, but not airtight proof of Italy's claim.

Digging through the Getty's files on the statue, Li's team found more pieces to the puzzle: the angry exchange of letters between senior Getty officials Luis Monreal and John Walsh; Renzo Canavesi's 1996 letter offering fragments and new information about the statue to the Getty, as well as True's ambivalent response. When Li contacted Malcolm Bell, the archaeologist reiterated his skepticism about the Morgantina provenance, but he acknowledged that the statue likely came from a place nearby, a conclusion that other scholars shared.

Canavesi was the one person who could answer the Getty's questions about the statue, yet no one at the Getty had ever questioned him. MTO hired the corporate investigative agency Kroll, which in turn hired a Swiss private detective to conduct a background check on Canavesi. Canavesi's paternal relatives had never been wealthy enough to afford such an important antiquity, the detective found, and although his mother's family had been rich, the fortune had vanished by the time Renzo was born. Could his father, a poor watchmaker, and his mother, a homemaker, really have bought a larger-than-life statue on the eve of World War II? It was highly unlikely, the detective concluded.

In April 2006, Canavesi agreed to tell his story to the investigators at his attorney's office in Lugano. After serving in the Swiss army during World War II, he said, he had been a policeman for ten years. He quit to start his own currency exchange, which later grew into a shopping mall.

He admitted to one brush with the law—being stopped by police when his friend, reputed antiquities smuggler Orazio di Simone, was in the car with him. Di Simone was the Sicilian who Italian authorities had repeatedly been told had smuggled the Aphrodite out of Italy. MTO considered contacting di Simone but decided against it after they were warned by Italian law enforcement sources that he had ties to organized crime.

As for the Aphrodite, Canavesi said that his father had bought the statue in the 1930s in Paris, where he was working in a watch factory. When his family returned to the Lugano region, his father kept the statue unassembled in his home. Canavesi did the same after his father gave him the statue in 1960, keeping it hidden away in boxes in the storage area of his shopping mall. Neither his brother nor his employees knew about it. He didn't think about selling it until 1986, when he met Christo Michaelides, Robin Symes's partner, at a Geneva coin auction. Canavesi said that he went home, pulled the statue out of its boxes, and assembled it with the help of a friend. Michaelides brought Symes to see the statue, and the dealers offered to buy it for $400,000, a transaction recorded on the hand-printed receipt from his money exchange that the Italians had in their dossier.

The whole story sounded absurd. If Canavesi's father had purchased the statue in Paris, how had he hauled it back to Switzerland and kept it in his family home without anyone else in the family knowing? And why would Canavesi, a self-professed lover of ancient art, keep such a magnificent antiquity packed away in a shopping mall basement?

As the investigators were about to leave, Canavesi said that there was one more thing. He pulled out some twenty photos and laid them out for the investigators to see. They had been taken in the early 1980s and showed the statue on the floor in fragments, surrounded by dirt.

The photos undermined Canavesi's already implausible story. They might as well have come from Medici's warehouse. Their visceral power came through even in the dry language the Kroll investigators used to describe them. Now, nearly ten years after Marion True had passed up the opportunity to see the photos, the Getty had prima facie evidence that the Aphrodite had been looted.

After receiving the report of Li's investigation, Brand was convinced that the statue would have to be returned. But he realized that doing so would be a delicate matter. Not only would the Getty trustees be reluctant to part with such a huge asset, but the Getty also had an immense emotional attachment to the Aphrodite. Like a grief counselor, Brand slowly started to prepare people at the Getty to accept the idea that they might have to let her go.

The process began at a mid-May 2006 board meeting where Li laid out the initial findings of the MTO investigation. The report filled several black binders and weighed more than twenty-five pounds. Touching on the Aphrodite, Li mentioned probl ems with Canavesi's provenance story, discussed his photos, and suggested that "dangerous people" had been involved. Brand tried to get a sense of board members' feelings about a general strategy for negotiating with Italy. What would be the board's conditions for returning the Aphrodite? What information did trustees need to make them feel comfortable with the possibility of giving it back?

Brand's probing hit a nerve. Two trustees pushed back, saying that they wanted the staff to look into the matter further before even talking about such a drastic step. Although the investigation had punched holes in Canavesi's story, Brand still couldn't tell them with any certainty where the statue had come from.

For other board members, the question was not if but when to play the Aphrodite as a trump card with the Italians. Why lay it on the table unless the Getty knew the endgame?

A
MONTH AFTER
Brand and Li visited Rome, one of Greece's top government prosecutors went to Italy to strategize with Ferri. The two countries shared the same goal—the return of looted art and the end of predatory collecting practices. Greece had noted Ferri's success at leveraging cooperation while holding out the threat of criminal prosecution. If it had not been for the criminal case against True, the Greeks recognized, the Met would never have agreed to a deal.

In April, Greek authorities borrowed a page from Ferri's playbook and swooped down on True's Páros home, seizing seventeen unregistered antiquities, mostly ancient architectural scraps that were common in most Greek households. Agents nevertheless were inflamed by the find and took particular umbrage when they discovered a framed poster of Alexander the Great next to True's toilet.

The raid was mostly for effect. Greece had a new culture minister—his predecessor's party had lost the national elections—who had already invited Brand and Li to Athens in May for discussions about the funerary wreath and three other contested objects. This raised the stakes for those talks.

Despite the Greeks' initial use of strong-arm tactics, they took a far more academic approach to their negotiations. When the two sides met in May, instead of hammering Getty officials with suspicion and innuendo, the director of the National Archaeological Museum spoke to them about the significance of art in ancient Greece. Another seni or cultural official detailed the history and craftsmanship of ancient funerary wreaths, down to the minutely coiled twigs and shimmering gold leaves. The winding of the thread on the Getty's wreath, he noted, was consistent with workshops in Macedonia. The measured approach particularly appealed to Brand, who was desperately looking for some way to expand repatriation discussions beyond legalisms.

Following the meeting, the Getty quickly agreed to return a fourth-century
B.C.
Hellenistic tombstone and the fifth-century
B.C.
marble relief that J. Paul Getty had purchased in 1955. But Brand asked for more information on the other two objects, a marble statue and the golden wreath, which the Getty had bought for a total of $4.45 million. Although not as iconic as the Aphrodite, the wreath was one of a kind and had been featured on the cover of the museum's antiquities masterpieces book. It had also been one of True's favorites. Greek officials would not be put off and made it known that their decadelong investigation of the funerary wreath would soon lead to criminal charges being filed against True.

The Greeks sent the Getty color photographs of the wreath—images authorities had seized from one of its alleged smugglers. The photos matched several black-and-white photographs that True had long ago received from Christoph Leon, the wreath's dealer. Li's team also found True's written exchange with Leon, in which she concluded that the object was "too dangerous for us to be involved with" shortly before the Getty bought it.

The museum soon announced that it was sending back both the statue and the wreath.

For years, the Getty had been frozen, unwilling to return objects that were clearly looted for fear of doing damage to True's legal situation. Now, with the new leadership, that had changed. The decision to return the wreath was a tacit admission that it was illicit, yet the Getty said nothing to defend its former curator when announcing the decision. Days later, a Greek prosecutor charged True with trafficking the golden wreath. She would now face trial in two countries.

True had largely been silent since her departure from the Getty, but the return of the wreath and the Greek prosecutor's charges drove her over the edge. In a bitter letter to three senior Getty officials, she tore into her former colleagues. "Once again you have chosen to announce the return of objects that are directly related to criminal charges filed against me by a foreign government ... without a word of support for me, without any explanation of my role in the institution, and without reference to my innocence." The Getty's "calculated silence," she continued, "has been acknowledged universally, especially in the archaeological countries, as a tacit acceptance of my guilt." The Getty had made her the scapegoat for more senior officials—she never mentioned Gribbon, Walsh, or Williams by name—who had been "fully aware of the risks" of buying the suspect antiquities.

A
T FIRST BLUSH,
a similar regime change in Italy seemed to be just as lucky for the Getty. When Olson, Li, and Brand returned to Rome with the Getty's initial offer in June, the conservative culture minister Buttiglione had been replaced after national elections by Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome and a center-left politician with Clintonesque charisma.