The Medici Conspiracy (2 page)

ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City announced—via an article in the
New York Times Magazine
—a sensational new acquisition. It was an exceptionally rare Greek vase, a
calyx krater
in the terminology of the classical world, meaning that it was a two-handled bowl, used for mixing water and the strong, heavy wine the ancient Greeks produced (they did not drink their wine “neat”). This krater was very large, designed to hold seven gallons of liquid, and very old, having been produced in the sixth century BC. It had been “thrown” by the potter Euxitheos and decorated by the painter Euphronios, who is acknowledged to be one of the two or three greatest masters of Greek vase painting. His works are so rare that the last important piece before this one had been unearthed as long ago as 1840. About eighteen inches high, the vase showed ten massive, beautifully fashioned ochre figures on a black background. The main figure was the dying, naked Sarpedon, son of Zeus—the greatest of all Greek gods—oozing blood from three wounds and being lifted up by the twin gods of Sleep and Death. The great warrior had delicate locks of reddish hair, and his teeth were clenched in a paroxysm of death. In other figures, young men were preparing for a battle that could kill them, the delicate lines of their armor beautifully rendered—in browns, red, and shades of pink. Not the least remarkable thing about “the Euphronios vase,” as it became known, was the price paid for it by the Metropolitan Museum—$1 million. This was the first time $1 million had ever been paid for an antiquity.

No sooner was the news about the acquisition made public than controversy erupted. Many—including several prominent archaeologists and museum curators—thought that the Met had been duped. Cornelius Vermeule, then acting director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, pointed out that a number of comparable vases were on the market, some for as little as $25,000, and that the most anyone had ever paid for a krater of
similar size and age was $125,000. John Cooney of the Cleveland Museum of Art appraised the vase at between $150,000 and $250,000, whereas Professor Ross Holloway of Brown University said $200,000 was the limit. On this reckoning, the Met had paid four to eight times what the krater was worth.

Still more controversial was the way the Met had actually acquired the vase.
¹
In February 1972, some months before the public announcement, according to the account given at the time, Dietrich von Bothmer, the curator of the Greek and Roman Department, had received a letter from a certain Robert E. Hecht Jr., an American dealer in antiquities then living in Rome. Educated at Haverford College, Hecht was the heir to a Baltimore department store fortune but had been living in Europe since the 1950s. In his letter to von Bothmer, Hecht had described the vase he had on offer as the equivalent—in beauty, importance, and price—to an impressionist painting. (The Met had itself opened the age of million-dollar impressionists with its then recent acquisition of Monet's
Terrasse à Sainte-Adresse
, for which it had paid $1,411,200.) Hecht gave it as his opinion that the vase on offer was the equal of the famous calyx krater in the Louvre, generally regarded as one of the three greatest pieces of pottery known.

In June that year, 1972, Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met, along with von Bothmer and the Met's deputy director and chief curator, traveled to Zurich to view the krater. Von Bothmer later said, “When I saw the vase I knew I had found what I had been searching for all my life.” Hoving was more grandiloquent.

There was no haggling over price, so it was said, and Hecht hand-carried the vase to New York at the end of August. Before it went on display, the cracks that covered the surface were painted over, at museum expense, and von Bothmer began to prepare a scholarly article on the vase to supplement the piece in the
New York Times
, which had been placed via Punch Sulzberger, a Met trustee and a member of the family that owned the paper.

To begin with, both Hoving and von Bothmer were coy as to exactly how they had acquired the krater, and about the cost, though the director, who appeared with it one morning on the
Today
show on ABC TV, admitted that the vase would be insured for $2 million. Hoving had told the reporter who compiled the initial
New York Times
story that the vase had been in a private collection in England at the time of World War I. Hoving said that he didn't wish to be more specific about the owners “because they have other things that we might want to buy in the future.”

The veiled explanation didn't stand much scrutiny. Many archaeologists were skeptical about Hoving's account from the very beginning because the Etruscans
^a
had always had a predilection for Euphronios, and it was generally assumed in the profession that the krater had been discovered on an illegal dig, somewhere north of Rome. In the trade, too, it was realized that a vase by Euphronios—who, after all, was very famous, the equivalent in the ancient world of Michelangelo or Picasso—could not have lain for half a century unknown in a private collection.

Then there was Hecht, the dealer. At that time he was persona non grata in Turkey following a scandal in which, on an internal flight from Izmir to Istanbul, he had taken out some ancient gold coins to examine them. An air stewardess noticed the coins and informed the captain, who radioed ahead to the airport. On arrival, police were waiting for Hecht,
arrested him, and seized the coins, which they discovered had been illegally excavated. The coins were therefore confiscated and Hecht expelled. He had also been arrested in Italy in the early 1960s, implicated in an antiquities-smuggling scandal, but acquitted.

The editors at the
Times
began to sense that the story they had run about the acquisition of the vase had been part of a carefully orchestrated presentation. No one likes being a patsy, and so the paper assigned a team of reporters to verify the real story. One of them, Nicholas Gage, began by delving into the customs records at New York's Kennedy Airport for August 31, 1972, the day when it was said that the vase arrived. After several hours, he found records for a vase valued at $1 million that had arrived that day aboard TWA flight 831 in the company of one Robert E. Hecht Jr. Flight 831 came from Zurich, so that's where Gage went next. In Zurich, he interviewed three dealers, each of whom said he had heard that the vase had been dug up in late 1971 in a necropolis north of Rome and was sold to Hecht by a well-known middleman for a little under $100,000. In Rome, others gave Gage the same story.

Meanwhile, back in New York, von Bothmer had been a little more forthcoming. He first of all confided that the vase could have come from England—or it could have come from Italy. “But it doesn't make any difference whether it was the 3,198th vase or the 3,199th vase found there.” All that mattered, he said, was whether it was genuine or fake, and how beautiful it was. “Why can't people look at it simply as archaeologists do, as an art object?” This statement severely damaged von Bothmer's credit among archaeologists. In a letter to the editor of the
New York Times
, Margaret Thompson of the American Numismatic Society spoke for many when she wrote: “I am outraged.... [A]ny archaeologist worthy of the name knows that the place and circumstances of discovery are of great significance for the archaeological record.” She was supported by the newsletter of the Association for Field Archaeology, which argued in an editorial that publication of the fantastic price of the krater had “at one stroke” enormously inflated the market for all antiquities. “The purchase cannot fail to encourage speculators whose objectives in acquiring ancient art . . . lie in the tax benefits to be saved by donating the objects to museums or educational institutions at their new market value.... As long as acquisition at any price is to be the credo of our major collections, they
will fail to serve the cause of knowledge and serve only to incite resentment and encourage crime.” And in fact that year, at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), traditionally held between Christmas and New Year's Day, and called in 1972 in Philadelphia, the scholars delivered a humiliating rebuke to von Bothmer. He was a distinguished man. A German by birth, he had studied at Berlin University and at Oxford with J. D. Beazley, the great historian and connoisseur of Greek vases. Von Bothmer was wounded in World War II, in the Pacific, and awarded the Bronze Star for heroic achievement—all this before joining the Met. That year, 1972, he was one of those slated for the six-strong board of trustees of the AIA—a nomination that is normally tantamount to election. But just before the vote, a seventh nomination was made from the floor. Von Bothmer came bottom of the vote—and out.

In speaking about the vase, its English provenance was not all that von Bothmer revealed. He also confirmed that he had first seen it in the garden of Fritz Bürki, a restorer who was listed in the Zurich directory as a
sitzmoberschreiner
, or chair mender. The vase had been broken, von Bothmer said, but had been reassembled and was complete, save for a few slivers. Von Bothmer further volunteered that, at the Met, if they were offered an object without a pedigree, or provenance, their normal policy was to submit a photograph of the object to the authorities in those countries “that might consider the object part of their cultural or artistic patrimony.” That procedure hadn't been followed with the Euphronios vase, however, because—it now turned out—Hecht
had
provided a pedigree. He said that the krater had belonged to an Armenian dealer named Dikran A. Sarrafian, who lived in Beirut, Lebanon. Hecht had provided two letters from Sarrafian, one dated July 10, 1971—that is, a few months before the alleged clandestine dig in Etruria. The first letter said, in part, “In view of the worsening situation in the M.E. [Middle East], I have decided to settle in Australia, probably in N.S.W. [New South Wales]. I have been selling off what I have and have decided to sell also my red figured crater which I have had so long and which you have seen with my friends in Switzerland.” It mentioned a price of “one million dollars and over if possible” and a commission of 10 percent for Hecht. The second letter, dated September 1972, confirmed that Sarrafian's father had acquired the vase in 1920 in London, in exchange for some Greek and Roman gold and silver coins.

On learning all this, the enterprising Gage dashed to Beirut, traced Sarrafian, who—over several whiskies at the St. George Hotel—told him that Hecht had just been and gone. Sarrafian, according to Gage, was a smalltime dealer in coins, who also organized archaeological tourism. He would not at first say what, exactly, Hecht had paid him for the vase, or why the American had flown to see him in such a hurry. He admitted to Gage that he did not collect—either vases or statues—but had inherited “a hatbox full of pieces.” This is the man that the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, would not identify to begin with because he owned other “major objects” that the museum might want.

This whole set of events—so improbable, so inconsistent and mysterious—had created a furor in Italy, as had the fact that so far as the fractures in the vase were concerned, none of them crossed any of the ten faces on the figures. This was miraculous good fortune. Unless, perhaps, the vase had been deliberately and carefully broken in order to smuggle it more easily out of the country where it had been found.

Gage didn't give up. Back in Rome, and acting on a tip, he drove to Cerveteri, the ancient site of an Etrurian city northwest of Rome, and went from door to door asking for a man known as
il Ciccione
(a modern American equivalent would be “Fatso”). According to the story he wrote later, Gage was eventually led to a two-room stone house where he found “a short, husky, unshaven man in bare feet.” This was Armando Cenere, a farm laborer and mason, who confessed to also being a
tombarolo
, or tomb robber. Later in the evening, sitting by his stove, Cenere further confessed that he had been one of a team of six men who had been digging nearby at Sant'Angelo in mid-November 1971, when they had turned up the base and handle of a Greek vase. He was detailed as “lookout” while the others cleared the entire tomb, a process that took a week. They found many pieces, including a winged sphinx, which they left in a field and then tipped off the police about it. This was to divert suspicion from themselves and what else they had found.

Cenere recalled to Gage one piece of pottery that, he said, showed a man bleeding from three wounds. Shown a photograph of the Met's Euphronios vase, he identified the portrait of the dying Sarpedon. He said he had been paid 5.5 million lire (about $8,800) as his (equal) share of the payoff.

Cenere's testimony, though vivid, was not conclusive. He could have been mistaken, he could have been inventing the details, in the hope of payment, or the limelight. If he and his friends did find the vase, and it was in pieces, it was unlikely that none of the breaks would cut across at least one of the figures' faces. Certainly, Thomas Hoving didn't accept the tombarolo's version; he even said the Met was being “framed” by the
Times
.