The Medici Conspiracy (28 page)

This vase too is among the Polaroids in Medici's Geneva warehouse. Indisputably, both these Euphronios vases started out with him. This, of course, is not without significance in regard to the provenance of the Metropolitan's Euphronios krater. Finding fresh tool marks on the fragments, did conservator Elston not ask herself what was going on?

Quite apart from the two vases by Euphronios, Pellegrini found two other objects of very great value that were once in the Hunt Collection and which were sold in the great sale of their collection at Sotheby's in 1990. These were a black-figure Attic kylix and a red-figure Attic
stamnos
(a large amphora with handles on the shoulder) showing figures bathing in a fountain. The documentation showed that both of these had passed through a gallery and an auction house: They had both been first sold at the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles and then been put on auction at Sotheby's in 1990.

However, in Medici's warehouse, besides the kylix and the stamnos themselves, he also found
photographs
of both objects,
but
, in both cases, they were fragmented, dirty with soil, “summarily reassembled” but with many gaps and altogether in the state normally associated with recently excavated material. There were three photographs of the stamnos, “with clearly evident missing parts,” though its provenance from Italian territory was made obvious by the fact that under the foot of the vase there was some writing, partly in Greek and partly in the Etruscan alphabet (the letters HE were in Greek, the letters CA in Etruscan).

So, a new but simple question arises. How could Medici have bought the kylix and the stamnos at the Hunt sale in 1990
and
have in his archive photographs of these self-same objects
before
they were restored? The answer was that he acquired them as soon as they came out of the ground, had them restored, passed them on to Hecht, for sale at the Summa Gallery, and then he
bought them back
. Why? To manipulate the market for his business.

Another six objects—all part of the Hunt Collection—appear in the seized photographs. Two were red-figure Attic amphorae, one was a black-figure Attic amphora, each shown in the photographs as “recomposed” in a preliminary way, with many gaps between the fragments and with the photographs evidently taken in a house. By the time they were sold, in the Sotheby's sale in New York, each was in perfect condition, with the gaps filled in and properly colored.

The pattern is wearily familiar.

In January 1994, the Royal Academy in London hosted an exhibition with a grand title, In Pursuit of the Absolute: Art of the Ancient World. This was in fact the George Ortiz Collection. The lack of provenance of many of the objects in the exhibition was criticized by archaeologists on BBC TV a few days after the show opened. Ortiz defended himself robustly, arguing that 85 percent of all antiquities on the market are “chance finds.” On the same program, Professor Colin Renfrew disagreed.

Ortiz was one of the names in Pasquale Camera's organigram. He himself has admitted that he bought much of his material from Gianfranco Becchina and from Koutoulakis, other names in the organigram. But he clearly didn't buy everything from them, because in one of the boxes of documentation seized in Geneva, among photographs depicting archaeological material “taken during or immediately after their removal from their original context,” Pellegrini came upon a Polaroid photograph of a sculpture in
nefro
. Nefro is a form of stone specific to the Vulci area of Italy. The photographs Pellegrini found had clearly been taken on the site where this sculpture was discovered, “still dirty with earth and not yet restored.” It depicted a horse with rider and was typical of Etruria, in particular the
markers used for Vulci burials. This horse and rider, shown in a farmyard in the Geneva photographs, was identical with one displayed in the Royal Academy exhibition. Pellegrini adds: “We must point out that in the catalogue file there is no mention whatsoever regarding the acquisition of the piece, evidently recent and through Medici, who had a copy of the [Royal Academy] volume in his small Geneva library.”

To take these collections at their own estimation of themselves, you would think that these are present-day marvels, jewels of collecting by people who care deeply about the past. Look through the catalogs for the exhibitions based on the collections and there are thousands of objects, worth millions of dollars. And yet,
not one
of these objects has a provenance and, we now know, they comprise mostly loot. These collections of statues, vases, and items of jewelry in fact tell us next to nothing about the past because the great majority of the objects have been ripped from their context by tombaroli, at times motivated (they say) by a misplaced “passion” for archaeology but always interested in money, and brought to market by Medici and his surrounding network, who, to judge from the markups
they
place on these objects, are even more interested in money, and exclusively so. It is these collectors whose funds and cavalier collecting habits, without thought for where these objects come from or how they were ripped from the ground, sustain the looting that does incomparable damage to the heritage of Italy and—without doubt—elsewhere.

D
ECIPHERING THE PAPER TRAIL that has been the subject of the previous four chapters occupied Maurizio Pellegrini for many months. It was a fascinating and important piece of detection, but from Paolo Ferri's point of view, it had one serious, indeed near-fatal flaw. The original documents they were dealing with were in Switzerland and the batch that Pellegrini had brought to Rome were photocopies. The information in the photocopies might be just as good as the information in the original documents, which were still sequestered in Geneva, but they were no good
as evidence
. Any court, anywhere, would insist on the documentation being original. The same argument applied to the objects themselves that were under seizure in Geneva. They were evidence, and if Ferri was to produce this evidence in court, in Rome, he had to get the vases and statues and bronzes themselves out of Switzerland and into Italy.

But, by early 2000, the Swiss still hadn't made a move, nor had they indicated whether they were likely to be proceeding against Medici. Time was passing. Medici was claiming that his business activities were being unreasonably disrupted, and he tried time and again to have the warehouse and its contents de-sequestered. He insisted on his innocence and that the charges against him be dropped.

But then, in early 2000, two occurrences came together. In 1997, it had emerged that a number of Swiss banks held many accounts belonging to victims of the Holocaust that had remained dormant since World War II, accruing interest but not being used. Many people—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—were outraged by this and felt that these monies should be
used to benefit Holocaust survivors. In 1998, a conference was held in Washington, D.C., and despite opposition from the Clinton administration, hundreds of state and local finance officials across the United States decided to implement sanctions against Swiss banks in their respective states, states that included California, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Initially, the Swiss criticized the boycott and threatened to sue. The three main Swiss banks—Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland, and the Swiss Bank Corporation—all resisted any payout. Just over a month later, however, and a matter of days before the sanctions came into force, the Swiss banks backed down and agreed to start payments to Holocaust survivors. Between then and the summer of 2000, an overall figure for repayment was worked out: $1.25 billion. This was settled by a judge in July 2000, and at the beginning of August that year, the three big Swiss banks agreed.

This was all happening at the time Pellegrini was working on the paper trail and while Ferri was waiting for the Swiss to decide on whether to prosecute Medici. The Holocaust survivor issue would prove crucial.

The second event was that Pellegrini finally sorted out a pattern in the documents that had been troubling him. He had been worrying away at the documents and had begun this part of his investigation by trying to find out exactly what Medici had sold at Sotheby's, and where these antiquities had ended up, after they passed through the London auction house. That was necessary if the objects were to be recovered. Ferri had officially asked Sotheby's in London for help, and the salesroom had sent him
some
documentation, but it wasn't complete—so they felt in Rome—and was consequently not as helpful as it might have been.
¹

So Pellegrini drew up a comprehensive list of what Medici had
consigned
to Sotheby's. Next, where he could, he matched this to photographs found in the Geneva warehouse. Finally, he did what he could to match these two sets of records with what was actually
sold
at Sotheby's. This exercise produced a confusing picture, at least to begin with. Some of Medici's objects were sold, and when they were, Sotheby's refused to say who had bought them. That was their commercial right, they said. But quite a few of Medici's objects did not sell and were included in later auctions—where, again, some sold and some did not.
Many objects were included in three or four auctions before they were finally sold.