The Medici Conspiracy (73 page)

• A small
kouros
statue in bronze, published on page 106, number 87 of the Levy-White catalog. “This appears in three Polaroid photos and in about ten [regular] photographs in which the small bronze clearly appears still dirty with earth.”

• A Calcidian
amphora,
number 102 in the catalog, published on page 134, also appears among many seized photographs, where it is shown before proper restoration, with many gaps between the fragments.

• A Panathenaic
amphora,
attributed to the Louvre Painter F6,
^ar
number 104 in the Levy-White catalog, appears in a Polaroid in one of the albums Medici kept. In the Polaroids, the
amphora
is broken and dirty with earth. In two other photographs, in a second album, it is shown as restored. Pellegrini also traced this
amphora
as being put up for sale at Sotheby's in London, on July 17, 1985, Lot 313.

• A black-figure Attic
amphora
attributed to the Bucci Painter (540–530 BC) was number 106 in the Levy-White Collection. This too appears in the seized photographs, and it too was sold at Sotheby's in London, this time on December 9, 1985—the very sale that Brian Cook of the British Museum had warned Peter Watson about. This is actually the vase that the British Museum would have bid for, had it had a proper provenance.

• Another black-figure Attic
amphora,
this time attributed to the Medea Painter Group and dated to 520 BC, number 107 in the Levy-White Collection, is depicted in four seized Polaroid photographs.

• A whole series of seized photographs show dozens of fragments appertaining to a
psykter,
“an important black-figure object,” published by von Bothmer in the catalog of the Levy-White Collection, page 149. The object in the seized photographs is completely fragmented and pictured on a kitchen tablecloth. In the Levy-White catalog it is of course totally restored but, as is evident from the motifs, it is undoubtedly the same object.

• A chalice-
krater
attributed to the Eucharides Painter (490–480 BC), showing Zeus, Ganymede, Hercules, and Iolaos, with an Etruscan inscription under the foot. This, number 117 in the Levy-White Collection, appears in fragments in the seized photographs.

• Pellegrini's report draws particular attention to two Caeretan
hydrie
(water storage vases from Cerveteri). It is especially interesting that these two vases were used to explain an article in the journal
Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum
(vol. 6 [2000]). The two vases in the Levy-White Collection were very distinctive—one showed a panther and a lioness attacking a mule, and the other showed Ulysses and his companions fleeing from Polyphemus's cavern (Polyphemus was the one-eyed giant in Homer's
Odyssey
who refused hospitality to Ulysses and his companions). Both these vases were shown in the seized photographs, where they are both broken and in fragments, with sizable gaps. In this case, however, the photographs also consisted of a number of enlargements, showing the fragments close up. What struck Pellegrini was that in the Getty article, discussing their construction and so forth,
various drawings of the vases were used, and these show the vases with the original break lines
as revealed in the seized photographs
. In other words, Peggy Sanders, who made these drawings, must have seen the vases either in the stages of restoration, or she must have seen the photographs that were eventually seized.

He explained what he meant, and how he could be so sure. The sale included a dozen Apulian vases. Most people know these vases from museums:
They usually have a black background with clear-cut, finely drawn, brownish-red figures on them and white filigree decoration. Apulia, modern Puglia, is a region of southern Italy (the “heel” in Italy's “boot”), the capital of which is Foggia, which was once part of greater Greece, or Magna Graecia. (The Melfi vases were Apulian vases.) Cook explained that the important point to grasp was that the world of Apulian vases is, in effect, a closed world, in the sense that every legally excavated vase—and some 6,000 are known to scholars—had been listed in a three-volume catalog compiled by Professor Dale Trendall and updated, to 1983, by Professor Alexander Cambitoglou. Between 1983 and the date of Watson's meeting with Cook, any other legally excavated vase would have been published in one of a small number of professional journals. Cook was familiar with these journals, he said, and none of the vases for sale at Sotheby's had been published there, or in Trendall-Cambitoglou. By definition, therefore, these vases had been illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.

“One or two might have been missed by Trendall or Cambitoglou,” said Cook, “but not the large numbers we are now seeing in the salesrooms.” Some of the vases in the Sotheby's sale were very important, he added, and there was one in particular, estimated at £60,000 in the catalog, that the British Museum would dearly have loved to acquire. But the museum considered the sale unethical and so would not be bidding for the vase. Instead, the trustees wanted such sales stopped and after due consideration had authorized Cook to speak to the press.

As Watson left the museum, Cook accompanied him part of the way, to where the museum's own Apulian vases were displayed. There he underlined how important these vases are. As general decoration they often show scenes from mythology, theater, the luxurious life of the elite, and some even make general political or sociological points. Besides being sometimes very beautiful, they are therefore valuable historical documents in themselves. Moreover, what they depict is very often related to where they are buried. Thus, if vases are illegally excavated and then smuggled abroad, important details are invariably lost to study. So the clandestine trade is more than a contravention of Italian law; it is a sad and significant loss to scholarship and our understanding of the classical world.

In addition to the Apulian vases, Hodges had documentation that concerned two specific antiquities. These were, first, a statue of the seventh-century BC Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus. The documents showed
that this was already in London when it was offered to Sotheby's to sell, but that it was in Britain illegally, because it had been smuggled out of Italy, from Rome. It became Hodges's job to export it to Switzerland and then reimport it—legally, as it were—from there. The reason for this roundabout subterfuge was that, should the statue have become the subject of any action by the Italian authorities, Sotheby's wanted to show that, so far as it was concerned, the paperwork was in order and showed that the statue had come from Switzerland—quite legally, because there were no restrictions on selling material imported from there. The paperwork that Hodges had, and leaked to us, showed that Sotheby's staff were well aware that the statue had been illegally exported from Rome and exchanges in the documentation outlined in detail how they set about overcoming this problem.

The second object for which Hodges provided the paperwork concerned a statue of another Egyptian deity, Sekhmet, the Lion Goddess, which Felicity Nicholson, the director of the Antiquities Department in London, had seen in Genoa and wanted to sell in London, where it would fetch a much higher price. This meant smuggling the statue out of Italy. On this occasion the documentation showed that she had persuaded a close friend and colleague, the London dealer Robin Symes, to actually carry out and oversee the smuggling, in return for a share of the profits when the Lion Goddess was sold. Symes did as she asked but, ironically, when the statue reached London, and then New York, ahead of being auctioned, where it was lit in order to be properly photographed, it was shown up as a fake. Symes's expenses therefore had to be reimbursed, which is how the matter generated so much internal Sotheby's documentation, paperwork that Hodges stole. Hodges' documents also identified a Mr. V. Ghiya, who was operating in much the same way out of India, via intermediary companies in Switzerland, who sold via Sotheby's.