The Medici Conspiracy (22 page)

In some ways, by getting involved with the antiquities underworld—the Medici conspiracy—the Getty Museum made a rod for its own back. The most obvious example is with the so-called Getty kouros. This was bought from Becchina, but the fake that was sent to the museum to
prove
that the kouros was not authentic was volunteered by Medici. Was he really trying to be helpful to the Getty, or was he settling old scores with Becchina? In dealing with such people as Becchina and Medici, how can one ever be certain—of anything? Medici claimed that
his
fake shared certain features with Becchina's kouros—but does that make the kouros fake? Who can be trusted when the cordate are bitter rivals?

T
HE GETTY MUSEUM IS A RELATIVELY new institution, but the same cannot be said about the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which traces its origins to a Fourth of July party held in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in 1866, when John Jay, a lawyer and grandson of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared to fellow New Yorkers at the table that it was time for the American people to found their own gallery of art. The charter of the Metropolitan Museum was approved by the New York State legislature in 1870, and the building was inaugurated in 1880.

The museum has some notable coups to its credit. J. P. Morgan, the banker and financier who made a practice of collecting other men's collections, had an active association with the Metropolitan. Through him, and through Roger Fry, the scholar and art historian whom Morgan hired, the Met made some outstanding purchases: Leonardo da Vinci's
Head of an Old Man,
Renoir's
Madame Charpentier and Her Children,
and other masterpieces by Andrea del Sarto, Giovanni Bellini, and Botticelli. Benjamin Altman left his Rembrandt and Limoges enamels to the museum. In 1961, the Met paid a record $2.3 million for Rembrandt's
Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer,
and in 1970 it acquired Velázquez's
Juan de la Pareja,
for a price that must have exceeded the £2.2 million that the Wildenstein Gallery had paid at auction shortly before.

From time to time, the museum has associated itself with lofty sentiments. Philippe de Montebello, the current director of the Metropolitan, lectures widely to groups across the United States, giving a talk titled, “Museums: Why Should We Care?” His lecture prospectus reads:

Given those sentiments and the museum's distinguished history, it is doubly regrettable that in the field of antiquities, the Metropolitan's record has been dismal. In fact, as the Euphronios krater affair showed, the Metropolitan's behavior on occasions can be positively lamentable. And it is not as if the Euphronios affair was an isolated case. When it comes to antiquities, the Metropolitan seems to lose its head.

The first noteworthy episode concerned the so-called Bury St. Edmunds Cross. This was an exquisitely carved ivory cross, a little less than two feet tall and just over a foot wide, and covered with tiny Romanesque figures and inscriptions in Latin and Greek. It was allegedly dated to the twelfth century, though there were scholars who doubted its authenticity. The cross appeared on the international art market, in a bank vault in Zurich, as early as the mid-1950s, but Thomas Hoving saw it in 1961, by which time it was already on offer to the British Museum for £200,000. The British Museum delayed, however, because it was concerned about whether the man offering the cross really had good title to it. His name was Ante Topic-Mimara and he was said to be a “former Tito partisan,” a politically active Yugoslav, though according to two German journalists of
Der Spiegel,
Topic, alias Mimara, had been head of the Yugoslav intelligence services in Germany and then, because he was a “museum custodian” by profession, had become a member of the Yugoslav Restitution and Reparations Commission in the U.S. Zone. He therefore had wide access to artworks in the process of being returned to their rightful owners after World War II.

The British Museum asked Topic-Mimara to warrant that he had full title to the cross he was offering to sell, but this was something he steadfastly refused to do. In fact, he always refused to say where he had gotten the cross and for this reason the British Museum deal fell through. One
evening, Hoving sat up drinking coffee with Topic-Mimara until, as midnight passed, the deadline expired. Thereupon, he paid over the $500,000-plus that was then the equivalent of £200,000, and the cross went to the Met.

The second episode, and conceivably the most outrageous antiquities acquisition of the Met, was that of the Lydian Hoard. In 1966, the museum had bought a treasure of gold, silver, bronze, and earthenware objects and wall paintings for $500,000 from the wealthy New York dealer J. J. Klejman, who said he had acquired it earlier from “ignorant” itinerant traders in Europe. He claimed the collection had been mixed with “junk” and was bought in at least two different European cities. Yet archaeologists who were able to see the treasure identified it as coming from ancient Lydia—the western part of modern-day Turkey, and the location of the kingdom of Croesus (as in “rich as Croesus”)—and they believed it to represent the contents of four entire tombs that had been looted near Sardis where, as it happened, Harvard University archaeologists were conducting a legitimate excavation. The hoard sat in the basement of the museum, largely unseen except when Dietrich von Bothmer allowed in a few favored visitors. At one point, he and Hoving placed five silver vessels into an exhibition, wrongly labeled as “Greek,” but no one noticed and they were returned to the basement.

Inside the museum, however, a memorandum was being circulated. Addressed to President C. Douglas Dillon, Director Hoving, Chief Curator Theodore Rousseau, and von Bothmer, it was written by Oscar White Muscarella, associate curator in the Department of Near Eastern Art (the man who complained about the acquisition of the Euphronios krater), and it was a passionate appeal against the destruction of burial mounds and against the purchase and display of objects lacking a scientific and secure provenance. Muscarella warned that if the museum were to risk exhibiting certain objects in its possession, it might trigger reprisals, “drastic action” against Western archaeologists in certain Middle Eastern countries. He also let it be known that a Turkish journalist had expressed to him an interest in inspecting the objects in the museum's basement.

The Turks knew that
tumuli
(tombs) in the Uşak region of west-central Anatolia had been broken into and looted by villagers. A number of objects were recovered by local police and the tomb robbers interviewed. Rumors
about the Metropolitan's acquisitions began to circulate in the early 1970s, but although the Met's own documents reveal that the museum recognized the objects as among its greatest acquisitions, the purchase of the collection—essentially intact—was not announced. It was not until some of the pieces were put on permanent display in 1984, as part of the museum's so-called East Greek Treasure, that Turkish scholars were able to conclude that the objects
were
those looted from the Uşak tomb. At first the Turks tried to reach a negotiated solution, but their approach was summarily rebuffed. Later the museum tried to resist legal action by the Republic of Turkey, arguing in court that the statute of limitations had expired. This caused a three-year delay in litigation, but after that time the Met's arguments were denied and a trial was ordered. During the discovery process, the internal Met documents that were produced were damning. The most shocking were those of the Acquisitions Committee in connection with the second of the museum's three principal purchases, which noted, among other things, that the objects being acquired were said to come from the same part of Anatolia as those “acquired earlier.” Another key aspect of the discovery process was the opportunity afforded to Turkish and American archaeologists to inspect at first hand the treasures in the Met's basement. Archaeologists who were familiar with the objects recovered from the tombs in Turkey were allowed to examine, close-up, the vast array of jewelry, ancient tools, wall paintings, silver oinochoe, and marble sphinxes. Among other things, from the measurements they took, they were able to match some of the frescoes in the museum basement to particular holes left on the walls of some of the tombs in Turkey.

Faced with such incontrovertible evidence, at the end of 1993 the museum caved in and agreed to return the treasure to Turkey without a formal trial. The treasure was returned the following year. But the way the museum had fought this case on a technicality and the fact that its own documents showed it was willing to acquire the objects even when its acquisitions committee knew it was loot left a bad taste. As one individual involved remarked, it was as if those at the Met were behaving like “pirates.”

There is
still
a bad taste in many people's mouths in regard to a different hoard, this time a collection of fifteen pieces of almost priceless
Roman silver looted from an important site in Sicily in Italy. The silver includes beautifully decorated bowls, a silver ladle, two silver horns, and a magnificent gilt-silver emblem featuring classical gods in bas-relief. This unique silver is valued in the region of $100 million. The Italian government wants the silver returned, but the Metropolitan, for years, refused to recognize the Italians' claim, which was backed up by information from a Mafia “snitch” and by the discoveries of a well-known American archaeologist.

The Met took delivery of the first eight silver and gilt objects in May 1981, to be followed exactly a year later, in May 1982, by six more. The silver, said an official of the museum at the time, came originally from Turkey and had been legally imported from Switzerland. The pieces were published in the museum's own
Bulletin
in the summer of 1984.

Having studied the 1984 bulletin, the Italian archaeological and law enforcement authorities became more and more convinced that the silver had been illegally excavated and smuggled not from Turkey but from Sicily. Conforti felt so strongly about this that he had a series of “Wanted” postcards made, one of which depicted some of the silver pieces. Others in the series depicted the so-called Morgantina Venus and the Acrolytes at the Getty (an acrolyte is the marble head—or hands, or feet—added to a statue). Each was laid out like an old-fashioned Wild West “Wanted” poster, reflecting Conforti's opinion of the morality of certain U.S. museums. His conviction was supported by information obtained by a Sicilian magistrate who, while investigating another case entirely, received the confession of one of the accused, a mafioso called Giuseppe Mascara. Mascara, who had decided to turn informer, described himself as “head” of the Sicilian tombaroli. He confessed that he himself had seen and tried to buy the silver in question but had not managed to clinch the deal. According to him, the Morgantina treasure had ended up on the U.S. market.

Morgantina, with its beautiful Greek theater, its colonnaded temples, and acres of ruins, is a classical site dating from the third to the second century BC, situated in the very heart of Sicily, in the province of Enna.

When faced with Mascara's accusation, the Met responded through its vice president (and in-house lawyer), Ashton Hawkins, that it was “perplexed” that the Italians should rely on the testimony of a mafioso, guilty
of other crimes. The Italians countered that the Americans ought to know from their own experience that when a mafioso decides to turn state's witness, he has nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying.

Then, in 1997 Professor Malcolm Bell entered the story. Bell, professor of archaeology at the University of Virginia, had been excavating at Morgantina for many years. He arrived at the conclusion that the silver in the Metropolitan Museum came originally from Morgantina because of two pieces of archaeological evidence he discovered. In the first instance, he found a coin that, in style, decoration, and silver content, he says came “from the same nucleus” as the silver in the Metropolitan.

In July 1997, he was asked by the Archaeological Superintendency for Enna, instigated by Dr. Raffiotta, to dig at Morgantina once again, this time in specific areas of Aidone indicated by the mafia “snitch” as possible sites for the provenance of the silver. There Bell discovered a house, already looted by tomb robbers, with two holes in the floor where he believes the silver was hidden: “When the Romans conquered Morgantina, a city already at the time famed for the quantity of its art works, the population panicked and many masterpieces were buried or hidden in cisterns or deep crevices.” The two separate holes, says Bell, would explain why the silver was brought to the market in two different lots.