Chasing Aphrodite (14 page)

Most important was the dating. The statue's "wet drapery" style and naturalistic features clearly belonged to the late classical period, putting the probable date of creation between 410 and 390 B.c., a time when Morgantina was in economic decline. It didn't make sense to Bell that the city would have commissioned such a monumental statue during an economic depression.

Bell wrote back to True a week later with a carefully mixed message. There were reasons to doubt that the statue came from Morgantina, but looters had found important objects there in the past. "I would therefore not rule out as a possible provenance for the piece at Morgantina," he wrote. "At the same time I can say that, at the time of writing, I know of no reason to argue that it was found at Morgantina."

Bell made copies of the photographs and brought them to Italy's regional director of archaeology, Graziella Fiorentini, who had dug at Morgantina in the late 1970s. It was the first time Fiorentini had seen the photos—the same photos the Getty's lawyers had sent to the Culture Ministry in Rome. The photos had failed to make it to her desk in Agrigento. Fiorentini was instantly reminded of the rumors she had heard in 1978 during her last season at Morgantina, the year before Bell had returned. That year, the town had been abuzz with talk of the large, intricately carved statue of soft stone that looters had found in the temple complex, where busts of Demeter and Persephone also had been discovered.

Digging in her files, Fiorentini uncovered two handwritten reports that lent support to those rumors. The site's guards had documented illegal excavations in November 1977 and December 1978 in the temple complex. The tombaroli had left behind several large holes in the ground and what appeared to be a limestone pedestal for a life-size statue. Armed with the circumstantial evidence, Fiorentini cabled True to say that she believed the Getty's statue may have been found at Morgantina.

The cable wasn't welcome news at the Getty, where the board had already approved the acquisition and was preparing to close the transaction. Fiorentini's warning was infuriatingly vague. True tried calling the archaeologist repeatedly, hoping to get more information, but Fiorentini played coy, refusing to come to the phone. She was worried that True would seize on any admission that Fiorentini lacked concrete evidence to support her hunch. Fiorentini hoped to stall until a proper investigation could be launched.

The ploy backfired. "If you have no information, your negative response confirms the answer we already received from the Ministry," a frustrated True fired back in a cable.

Fiorentini contacted the Carabinieri's stolen art squad in Rome, providing copies of the photos and requesting a formal investigation. Then she sent True a Mailgram putting the Getty on notice that Italian officials had opened an international investigation into the statue's origins.

The Mailgram arrived on the afternoon of July 22, 1988. That same day—the precise timing isn't clear—Harold Williams signed the final documents consummating the purchase of the Aphrodite.

***

F
IORENTINI'S REQUEST LANDED
on the desk of the Carabinieri's art squad, the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale. Established in 1969, it was the first police unit in the world dedicated exclusively to tracking stolen art, a monumental order for a country that virtually bleeds culture. The art squad was headquartered in Rome's rococo Piazza di Sant'Ignazio, a few blocks from the Pantheon and around the corner from the Ministry of Culture, to which the unit reported.

In its early days, the unit was given only a handful of agents to accomplish its impossible task—protecting the millions of cultural treasures along the length of Italy's boot. Constructing a highway, excavating a building foundation, or even digging a simple rural well routinely unearthed dozens of archaeological treasures, all of which could be spirited away to the antiquities market.

Tips poured in, but the guardians of Italy's cultural heritage could pursue only the most significant cases. Limited resources made compromises inevitable. Unlike colleagues in the drug unit, the art squad concentrated on recovery, not arrests. When caught in the act, a drug dealer might flush the cocaine down the toilet. The art squad couldn't take the risk that an art thief would try something similar, cutting to ribbons a priceless painting or smashing an ancient vase to avoid prosecution. The squad often let a looter go if he agreed to return a valuable antiquity. Although that meant recovering some prized objects, it relegated looting to little more than a traffic violation. The squad's poor track record was compounded by the fact that a number of agents were either incompetent or marking time before retirement.

To compensate for its limited effectiveness, the squad indulged in elaborate recovery ceremonies, featuring Carabinieri in their signature blue paramilitary uniforms standing at stiff attention around a velvet-lined table holding the prodigal object. The spectacles masked a deeper political problem: in the constantly shifting landscape of Italian bureaucracy, no one had the political will to stop the looting or set aside more than a token budget for the art squad. A fraction of 1 percent of Italy's national budget went to protect its vast cultural heritage—less than other European countries with far less significant archaeological resources spent.

By the 1980s, Italy had yet to reckon fully with the escalating loss of its vast archaeological heritage. Looting remained rampant across the country, with corrupt officials often working in cahoots with the smugglers. Still, those spectacular pieces that got away—the Met's controversial Euphronios krater, the Getty Bronze, and now the Aphrodite—were sources of shame for some Italians.

One of those angered by the antiquities trade was Silvio Raffiotta, a state prosecutor in Sicily and an amateur archaeologist who had grown up in a house that overlooked the ruins of Morgantina. Many of his boyhood friends had turned to looting as a second job. Raffiotta felt that they were merely pawns of the real culprits—the cartel of foreign dealers, mostly based in Switzerland, who paid diggers pennies while getting rich on the illicit antiquities trade. Determined to shut down the trade, Raffiotta launched an investigation into the looting shortly after he became state prosecutor in Enna, the regional capital, not far from Morgantina. Wiretaps on the phones of a few local tombaroli soon uncovered a far more organized criminal network than he had imagined. The recorded conversations revolved around one man, Giuseppe Mascara, the local boss whom Bell had once chased into the brambles. Armed with transcripts, Raffiotta arrested Mascara and some forty other looters from the surrounding towns.

In a jailhouse interview, Mascara admitted that he had been involved in selling some of the smaller finds in the area. But the three truly great discoveries pried from Morgantina's soil had gone straight to middlemen able to pay up-front, he said. The first of these discoveries was an ancient silver service. The second was a group of three marble heads. The third was a large, intricately carved statue of soft stone.

The member of the Carabinieri art squad assigned to the investigation was Fausto Guarnieri. He developed sources among the looters around Morgantina. They were men of little education but great pride, men who considered themselves amateur archaeologists—and victims. They were paid peanuts for great masterpieces now on display in foreign museums. Guarnieri appealed to their resentment against those who made more money up the distribution chain.

The sources were able to fill in details about the discoveries Mascara had mentioned. The silver service had been found in the ruins of an ancient house just off the main road through Morgantina. Orazio di Simone, an alleged smuggler from the nearby coastal town of Gela, had bought it. The silvers fetched $875,000 when di Simone sold them to Robert Hecht in Switzerland. Rumor had it that they had been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for far more.

The three marble heads had been discovered by two shepherd brothers in 1979 after heavy rains had unearthed one of the objects in the temple complex dedicated to Demeter and Persephone. Two of the heads were smaller in size and older than the third, which bore the finely modeled features and serene face of the classical era. All three were also sold to di Simone through middlemen for $1,000.

Raffiotta turned to Bell, whom he had befriended over the years, for help in tracking the heads down at the other end of the market. The objects were so unusual that doing so proved rather easy. The archaeologist learned that the Getty Museum had recently put two marble acrolithic heads on display. He had a colleague go to the museum to take photos of them. The placard said that they were on loan from an unnamed New York collector. Bell gave the photos to Raffiotta, who confirmed with Mascara and the other tombaroli that they were the same heads that had been found in Morgantina.

But Bell couldn't find the third head, the one from the classical era. The same was true for the large statue of soft stone that Mascara had described. Guarnieri found that there had been persistent rumors about the statue—even the local mayor and his assistants knew of it—but that its current location was a mystery.

Assessing the case, Raffiotta and Guarnieri felt that the tombaroli's testimony and the photos of the two heads gave them enough evidence to press a criminal case that would charge the Getty Museum with possession of stolen property. It was a bold step. Not since the controversy over the Euphronios krater had an Italian prosecutor accused a foreign museum of playing a role in looting. Just as they were preparing to take their case public, Fiorentini's demand for an investigation into the Aphrodite landed on their desk.

I
N LATE JULY
1988, less than a week after buying the Aphrodite, the Getty Museum revealed its marquee purchase. True told the press that it was "unique to the world ... the only complete acrolith known to exist" and a "critical addition" to the museum's collection, which had lacked a centerpiece for its objects from the classical period. As to its origins, a Getty press release was circumspect. The statue had been acquired from a European dealer representing a private collector, it said, adding that such acroliths were most commonly found in southern Italy and Sicily, where marble was scarce.

The announcement provoked awe in the art world. Once again, an important piece of classical sculpture had seemingly appeared out of nowhere and was now on display at the Getty. For Thomas Hoving, however, it was confirmation that his disgruntled dealer had been onto something. After receiving the tip, Hoving had deployed one of
Connoisseur's
best researchers to Sicily to investigate the origins of the statue. His reporter contacted Fiorentini, who described her suspicions about the statue and mentioned the pending criminal investigation. Hoving had a hot scoop.

Fearing that the story wouldn't hold for
Connoisseur,
which wasn't due out for another month, he shopped it around to several newspapers. On August 3, 1988, the
International Herald Tribune
ran an exposé on the Aphrodite across two columns on the front page. The
Los Angeles Times,
which had turned down Hoving's story, had its own staff-written story the same day. It quoted Fiorentini as the source of allegations that the statue may have been looted from Morgantina. The case against the statue, the story noted, was "rooted less in hard clues than in scholarly deduction and rumors of archeological grave robbing."

The allegations caused a public scandal reminiscent of that stirred up by the Euphronios krater sixteen years earlier. Newspapers throughout Europe followed up, and journalists descended on Morgantina to track down the origins of the Aphrodite. Once there, however, they were greeted with confusion.

In Enna, Silvio Raffiotta was fuming. Circumstances had conspired to steal his thunder about the two marble heads at the Getty. Instead, everyone was focused on the Aphrodite. As the international press swarmed the area, the prosecutor called a hasty press conference to announce that there was indeed loot at the Getty—but not the loot the reporters were asking about. The two marble heads, Raffiotta claimed, were historically and artistically "much more interesting and valuable" than the goddess. And whereas there was no concrete evidence concerning the Aphrodite, Raffiotta declared that he could unequivocally prove that the two heads now sitting in a Getty showcase had been looted from Morgantina.

Raffiotta's pique deflected journalistic attention from the goddess, sending reporters back to the Getty to ask about the heads. The museum said little. The night after Raffiotta's press conference, the heads were hurriedly taken off display, boxed up, and sent back to Maurice Tempelsman, the New York collector who had bought them from Robin Symes.

The next day, the museum announced that the objects in question had been returned. "Any discussion of the possible provenance of these objects should be between their owner and the Italian government," a spokeswoman said, refusing to name the owner.

The story of the two heads soon died. Meanwhile, the Aphrodite remained on display, almost forgotten in the swirl of controversy.

W
ITHIN THE GETTY,
the Aphrodite's debut brought the feud between John Walsh and Luis Monreal to a head. Monreal, who had so bitterly protested the statue's acquisition months earlier, read about the statue's raucous debut in Greek, Italian, French, and British papers while vacationing in the Greek islands. He fired off a four-page screed to Walsh and Harold Williams on August 7, repeating his warnings about the statue and calling on the museum to stop buying undocumented antiquities.

Walsh fired back a bare-knuckle response, bristling at Monreal's criticism. Monreal's plea was "unduly restrictive," Walsh wrote.

When you wrote that any policy should recognize that a high percentage of the best archaeological material is illicit, if not illegal, did you think that we or the trustees don't already know this? Your corollary, that we should refrain from purchasing antiquities which do not have clearly established status, sounds good but what does that mean?...This kind of guilty until proven innocent approach ... is an alternative that has been advocated by some of our colleagues and one that we presented to the trustees and discussed at great length. The trustees concluded that such an approach is not only unrealistic, but in many cases works against the preservation of works of art.