The Medici Conspiracy (47 page)

There is a lesson here. Because no one would touch such an important—but unprovenanced—object, it is going to be properly published, and then returned to where it belongs.

In February 2000, Staffan Lunden, a Swedish journalist who was also an archaeologist, was researching a Roman funerary relief that had recently been acquired by the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities in Stockholm. Lunden was interested in the object because, judging by stylistic criteria, it must have come from Ostia, outside Rome—but how and when?

Tracking the object back, he found that the Stockholm Museum had acquired it from Galerie Arete in Zurich in 1997. Before that, it was auctioned at Sotheby's in New York in December 1992, and before that, in 1991, it had belonged to Numismatic Fine Arts, Bruce McNall's gallery in Los Angeles. Before that, however, it was mentioned in Guntram Koch's
Roman Funerary Sculpture: Catalogue of the Collections,
published by the Getty. In the catalog, Koch said that the Stockholm relief had been on the “New York art market” in 1986 but didn't specify which gallery. However, also published in the catalog was a very similar one, which was in the Getty itself. Koch's text made it clear that this relief, the Getty's object, was acquired from the Summa Gallery, another of McNall's firms. Being aware of the close links between McNall and Robert Hecht, and of Hecht's reputation, Lunden wondered whether McNall-Hecht had anything to do with the Stockholm relief.