The Medici Conspiracy (9 page)

Not all states ratified the convention with equal enthusiasm. Here are the ratification dates for a variety of states, from which a pattern will be evident: Cyprus, 1980; Egypt, 1973; France 1997; Greece, 1981; Italy, 1979; Jordan, 1974; Peru, 1980; Turkey, 1981; United Kingdom, 2003; United States, 1983. Denmark, Holland, and Germany have still to ratify the 1970
convention. Switzerland did so in 2004. In other words, there is still a reluctance to do so on the part of most market states.

This is despite evidence that the world's archaeological heritage—the material remains of past human activities—is being destroyed at an undiminished pace. In 1983, one study showed that 58.6 percent of all Mayan sites in Belize had been damaged by looters. Between 1989 and 1991, a regional survey in Mali registered 830 archaeological sites, of which 45 percent had already been damaged, 17 percent badly. In 1996, a sample of eighty were revisited and the incidence of looting had increased by 20 percent. A survey in a district of northern Pakistan showed that nearly half the Buddhist shrines, stupas, and monasteries had been badly damaged or destroyed by illegal excavation. In Andalusia, Spain, 14 percent of known archaeological sites have been damaged by illicit excavation. Between 1940 and 1968, it is estimated that something like 100,000 holes were dug in the Peruvian site of Batan Grande and that in 1965 the looting of a single tomb produced something like ninety pounds of gold jewelry, which accounts for about 90 percent of the Peruvian gold now found in collections around the world. In 1997, in the Qinghai Province of China, the ancient tombs at Reshui, one of the country's “Ten Most Famous Archaeological Sites,” were looted by more than 1,000 local people, “who ‘excavated' the tombs with high explosives and bulldozers.” In Inner Mongolia the government estimates that between 4,000 and 15,000 tombs have been looted, and overall, the Chinese authorities estimate that between 5,000 and 12,000 looted objects reach the market every year. He Shuzhong, of the National Administration on Cultural Heritage in Beijing, who provided these figures, told us that one Chinese tourist company even runs a course on illicit excavation. He himself was physically assaulted on one occasion when he chanced upon looters at a site. In Niger, archaeologists at the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey estimate that in the Bura, Bangare, and Jebu areas of the country, more than 90 percent of the sites have been looted, and in other areas, such as Windigalo and Kareygooru, 50 percent have been destroyed. And this is nowhere near the end of it.

The looting of Iraq is of course well known—between the end of the first Gulf war, in 1991, and 1994, eleven regional museums were broken into and 3,000 artifacts and 484 manuscripts taken, of which only fifty-four have been recovered. Following the second Gulf war, in April 2003,
at least 13,515 objects were stolen from the Baghdad Museum, of which, by June 2004, something like 4,000 had been recovered. Despite the Taliban's high-profile demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas for “religious” reasons, most of the destruction of Afghanistan has been wrought by the search for salable antiquities and manuscripts; it has continued, if not actually worsened, since the Taliban's removal from power.

Further information about the material scale of the illegal trade can be extracted from official police statistics. In Turkey, for example, between 1993 and 1995 there were more than 17,500 official police investigations into stolen antiquities. In 1998, the Turkish Department of Smuggling and Organized Crime reported that in the previous year, 565 people had been arrested who had, between them, more than 10,000 archaeological objects in their possession. Greek police reported that between 1987 and 2001, they recovered 23,007 artifacts. In one year, 1997, German police in Munich recovered fifty to sixty crates containing 139 icons, sixty-one frescoes, and four mosaics that had been torn from the walls of northern Cypriot churches.

The Italian experience is just as bad. The Carabinieri Art Squad was founded in 1969—just as the 1970 UNESCO convention was being prepared—as a result of an upsurge in looting and black-market trading associated with the postwar rise in prosperity of the West and the increasing sophistication of the art market. The official title of this new unit was the “Comando Carabinieri Ministero Pubblica Istruzione—Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistica” (Ministry of Education Carabinieri Division—Unit for the Defense of Cultural Heritage), or TPA for short. Italy at that point became the first country to have a police department specifically assigned to combat art and archaeological crimes. In 1975, the TPA became part of the new Ministry of Fine Arts and the Environment and moved into the fine building it still occupies, designed by Filippo Raguzzini (1680–1771). A computerized database was developed as early as 1980. Among the TPA's high-profile recoveries have been Piero della Francesca's
Flagellation,
stolen from Urbino in 1975 and recovered in Switzerland a year later; Raphael's
Esterhazy Madonna
, stolen in Budapest in 1983 and recovered in Greece two months later; in addition to the recovery of works by Dürer, Tintoretto, and Giorgione. The TPA has helped train the art squads of other nationalities, including Palestinians and Hungarians; following the
second Gulf war, in 2003, the Italians were asked to help organize the security at Iraq's many archaeological sites. Since it was created, the TPA (today the TPC) has recovered more than 180,000 works of art, nearly 8,000 of them abroad, and more than 350,000 antiquities. It has exposed 76,000 forgeries and brought charges against nearly 12,000 people.

In the 1980s, dealers in the market countries introduced codes of ethics, and museums revised their acquisitions policies but, very often, it has to be said, these moves were not much more than window dressing. In the 1990s, UNESCO sought to tighten up the 1970 convention, in particular with regard to the level of “due diligence” that dealers, collectors, and museums must use when acquiring cultural property without a fully documented history. This resulted in the so-called UNIDROIT convention, which was adopted by member countries in 1995 and came into force in July 1998. This convention says, in effect, that dealers, collectors, and museums must take active steps, or “due diligence,” to satisfy themselves that cultural property without an adequate documented history has not been illegally excavated or smuggled. In other words, the onus is on the “good faith” purchaser to prove his or her good faith. In the United Kingdom, a new law was introduced in 2004 that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly trade in illicitly excavated archaeological objects.

Thus, there was a crucial change in attitude in the 1990s, the fruit of what had gone before. And this formed part of the “deep background” to both the Carabinieri's investigations of the illicit antiquities trade in Italy and our own journalistic investigations. The Italian Art Squad recognized that, eventually, it would have to take on the source of the
demand
for antiquities—the auction houses, and the dealers, museums, and collectors in the market countries—which is what made the discovery of the organigram so important. And Hodges realized that, having been sent to jail and humiliated by Sotheby's intransigence, he was in a position to seriously embarrass Sotheby's
and
do irreparable harm to the illicit antiquities network. As administrator in the relevant department, he had been vividly aware of the background legal, law enforcement, and archaeological issues swirling around the lucrative business of unprovenanced antiquities and the routine need at Sotheby's for subterfuge and deception. Faced with his particular, personal predicament, he was in a unique position to do something about it.

S
CULPTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR and has been created afresh throughout history. Its appeal and beauty are obvious. Vases are different. Like sculpture, ceramics have been produced throughout history and in many different locations. But Greek vases stand out, partly for the great variety of their shapes, but mainly for the drama of the paintings that grace those shapes and are so
different
from anything else. These factors have combined to produce in art lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors a greater level of
passion
for Greek vases than for any other kind.

Given the sheer numbers of vases that have been excavated, there can be little doubt about their popularity in antiquity. An Athenian fifth-century BC poet, listing the most noteworthy products of different peoples, praised Athens for its invention of the potter's wheel and “the child of clay and the oven, noblest pottery.” Plato wrote that a fine clay vase can be “very beautiful” though “not when set beside maidens.” Pliny observed that in his day (he died in AD 79, observing the eruption of Vesuvius), “the greater part of mankind uses earthenware vases.” Some Roman graves have been found containing Greek and Etruscan vases, but not many.

In more modern times, however, the passion for collecting these extraordinary relics of the past did not really emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century. There
were
vases in Renaissance collections (for example, the Medici in Florence had a vase collection, according to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote biographies of many artists), and ancient vases are mentioned in five collections in a Roman guidebook of the time. But their eighteenth-century popularity followed the discovery—in the late 1730s
and then throughout the 1740s—of the buried remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had been overwhelmed in AD 79 when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, spreading ash over a wide range and completely obliterating whole cities across a large area. The excavation of entire towns—whose inhabitants had been so surprised at the suddenness of the eruptions that they had been trapped going about their everyday activities, with their bodies as it were “frozen” for all time—captured the imagination of Europeans and others and was one of the factors that made archaeology popular. It was a vivid episode with which everyone could identify. Whole rooms, whole houses, entire temples and tombs, rows of shops and villas, even complete theaters, were recovered over the decades, together with fabulous frescoes, important sculptures, hoards of silver, armor, and other objects, some of them luxurious, some of them common-or-garden variety, all of them fascinating for the vivid light they threw on the past.

The Dominican friar Antonio da Viterbo wrote of “Truscomania,” but it was the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelman who paid several visits to Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1760s and helped establish what became known as the Greek revival in a book that took eighteenth-century Europe by storm,
The History of the Art of Antiquity
. In the text he said that the allure of Greek art, its defining characteristic, was its “noble simplicity and calm grandeur,” a phrase that became famous, and is indeed still famous. Generations of Germans and others, such people as Herder, Goethe, and Byron, became obsessed with ancient Greek culture. During Goethe's Italian journey in 1787, he observed, “One now pays a lot of money for Etruscan vases, and certainly one finds beautiful and exquisite pieces among them. Every traveller wants one.” There was an early collection of vases in the Vatican. Initially, they were regarded as Etruscan and played a role in establishing the view that a large and sovereign Etruria was the basis of Western civilization. Winckelman, however, argued for their predominantly Greek origin. Laws to control their export were introduced as early as 1624 and again in 1755.

The Etruscans were in fact a rather mysterious people, but they were important because they composed the earliest urban civilization in the north Mediterranean, flourishing sometime between the ninth and first centuries BC, being most dominant in the sixth to third centuries. Much of what we know about them comes from the early writings of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, for example, they originally occupied the land of Lydia—what is now western Turkey—but were compelled to disperse after a great famine, when half the nation moved on and half remained behind. Their leader at the time was Tyrrhenos, from whom they adopted the name Tyrrhenians (and hence the Tyrrhenian Sea, along the western coast of Italy). Another theory is that they left Turkey after the fall of Troy, but the most recent archaeology suggests that the Etruscans were actually descendants of the Villanovans, people who thrived in central Italy in the ninth and eighth centuries BC and had an active artistic tradition, especially in bronze jewelry and glass-paste beads. Etruscan cities began to arise in the seventh century BC where Villanovan villages had once been. During the 700s BC, the Etruscans developed into a series of autonomous city-states: Arretium (Arezzo), Caisra (Caere, or modern Cerveteri), Veii, Tarchna (Tarquinii, or modern Tarquinia), and Velch (Volci, or modern Vulci).

The first Etruscan pieces to be discovered were two bronzes, found as long ago as 1553 and 1556, that is, during the Renaissance. Etruscan excavations proper began in the late eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, major archaeological discoveries were made at several sites, including Tarquinia, Ceveteri, and Vulci, all cultures that feature in the discoveries made in the Medici warehouse at Geneva.