The Medici Conspiracy (24 page)

You might think that it would be good practice for the network of dealers that surrounded Medici, based as it was in Switzerland, to steer clear of Swiss museums when it came to trading in illicit goods. Not at all. The head of archaeology at the Geneva Art and History Museum, Jacques Chamay, for instance, was involved with the Medici vases sold to Berlin.

Furthermore, from the material seized in Geneva, but in this case also from additional material seized at Medici's homes in Santa Marinella, north of Rome, and from his apartment in Geneva, the Carabinieri discovered that Medici received assistance from an unusual source. She was Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, a Swiss archaeologist who, ostensibly, worked for Swiss customs. It was she who, beginning in 1980 and continuing certainly until Medici's trial in 2003, authenticated thousands of objects. Acting in an official capacity, it was her job to issue certificates of authenticity and provide evaluations for tax purposes should the objects be imported permanently into Switzerland. She also issued
passavant
documents, essentially temporary import certificates that enabled, for example, an antiquity to be restored at the Bürkis' Zurich laboratory and then returned to the Freeport without requiring any payment of duty. In the first instance, Pellegrini found that some of her descriptions of objects were so vague that one could never be certain that the object returned to the Freeport was the same as the one that had left. Her expertise enabled Medici to show that the objects he was dealing in were genuine and not fakes. It seems she must have turned a blind eye to where these objects were coming from. The fact that these antiquities—or most of them—were genuine satisfied the Swiss concern that the Freeport might be being used in some sort of widespread antiquities faking operation. But of course Cottier-Angeli's certificates of authenticity doubly suited Medici because, besides authenticating the objects, she provided documentary proof that the objects had been in Switzerland, and exported from there, ostensibly legally.

Over the years, however, Cottier-Angeli became rather more than a consultant on behalf of Swiss customs. Frida Tchacos told Ferri that Cottier-Angeli had the keys to Medici's warehouses and that she herself was dealing in objects acquired from him. (Cottier-Angeli later denied this.) Among the documents, for instance, Pellegrini found an envelope marked “111,” inside which was a small handwritten exercise book “in which Medici indicates a deposit (in the sense of a warehouse) in which two objects were being kept—a bronze candelabrum with a youth and a small
pig, and a stamnos attributed to Kleophon.” Elsewhere in the documents, Pellegrini found a photograph of a candelabrum with the same subject (a youth and a small pig), bearing the words: “
venduto C.A.
” (“sold C.A.”)—C.A. here being Cottier-Angeli. The same candelabrum was depicted in the photographs relating to the inventory of the Hydra Gallery during the 1986 proceedings, drawn up by the law firm of Piguet.
^e
In Medici's notebooks, many objects were sold to “Madame,” a term that was interchangeable with “C.A.”

The closeness of the relationship is further underlined by the fact that Pellegrini found that Cottier-Angeli was a member of the scientific directors for an exhibition held in Jerusalem in 1991, titled Italy of the Etruscans. She was listed in the catalog as one of the organizers for this exhibition, and she contributed to the text. Pellegrini established that various objects displayed in Jerusalem were once in Medici's possession. Several of them are to be found in the seized photographs, many in a state prior to restoration. Once again, among these objects is a bronze candelabrum, with a youth and small pig, where it is indicated as belonging to a Swiss collection, “A. P.” This, Pellegrini discovered, refers to Alain Patry, a man who audits the accounts for the “Hellas et Roma” Association in Geneva. This association was founded by Cottier-Angeli, and its coordinator is—or was then—Pierre Cottier, her husband. A second example concerned an exhibition, Homère chez Calvin (Homer in the Land of Calvin), held at the Art and History Museum in Geneva in 2000–2001, cosponsored by the Municipal Department for Cultural Affairs of the City of Geneva, and the “Hellas et Roma” Association. Among the illustrations in the catalog of this exhibition is a photograph of an Apulian chalice-krater showing an episode from the Trojan War, a scene outside the walls of Troy, with many episodes of battle, men with shields and spears, and women watching. The caption lists the krater as belonging to a Swiss private collection, yet this same object is depicted in the photographs seized from Medici, where it is shown in fragments before being restored.

This is enough about the exhibition at the Art and History Museum in Geneva for the moment. But as with the Getty, as with the Met, as with the German museums, we are not yet quite finished with Fiorella Cottier-Angeli or Jacques Chamay.

I
N 1993, RICARDO ELIA, an archaeologist from Boston University, wrote a book review in the pages of
Archaeology
magazine, the forum of the Archaeological Institute of America, the institution to which most U.S.-based professional archaeologists belong. The review was titled “A Seductive and Troubling Work,” and its subject was a catalog that had just been published,
The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection,
by Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University in England. Cambridge boasts the oldest archaeology department of any university in Western Europe or North America, and Colin Renfrew was (and is) probably the greatest archaeologist of his generation.

Born in 1937, Renfrew is the author of at least three seminal works in archaeology. The first was
The Emergence of Civilisation
, an examination of the Cyclades in the third millennium BC, which challenged accepted notions of how civilization developed. The second was
Before Civilisation
, an analysis of the radiocarbon revolution in the subject, which challenged the assumption that prehistoric cultural innovation originated in the Near East and then spread to Western Europe. And the third was
Archaeology and Language
, which examined the notion of whether there has ever been a “mother tongue,” a proto-language spoken by most of mankind's early peoples, before the evolution of the languages we speak today.

Renfrew was made a member of the House of Lords in Britain in 1991 and so was, without question, just about as distinguished and successful as an archaeologist could be. Nonetheless, in “A Seductive and Troubling Work,” the much younger Ricardo Elia criticized him—and criticized him robustly. In his review, Elia's argument was drawn from the fact that Renfrew had lent his considerable name to a collection of Cycladic antiquities
in which
none
of the objects had any secure provenance whatsoever. Renfrew, Elia said, had written about the collection as a jewel, as a wonderful aspect of Cycladic art—and yet, archaeologically speaking, it had no meaning. Because these objects had been looted, no one could have any real idea which island they had come from, what age they were, what their function was, what their relationship was to one another, whether they had been painted over in antiquity, and so on. For Elia, the Goulandris Collection barely deserved the name: It was booty rather than a proper collection, which ought to tell us as much as possible about the past. He regretted that a distinguished professor had lent his name and prestige to such an enterprise. “Collectors,” he said, “cause looting by creating a market demand for antiquities. Looting, in turn, causes forgeries, since forgeries can only remain undetected where there is a substantial corpus of antiquities without proper archaeological provenance. These two problems—looting and forgery—fundamentally corrupt the integrity of the field of ancient art history.” Elia ended his review with a phrase that was to cause much controversy, but would stick. “The truth is,” he said, “Collectors are the Real Looters.” Without their money, and their demand, there would be no market.

No one likes being criticized, but Renfrew took Elia's attack in good humor—and on the chin. He replied in the next issue of
Archaeology,
and in doing so he substantially accepted Elia's point. He agreed that in lending his credibility to the Goulandris Collection, he had, however inadvertently and indirectly, added to the risk that more antiquities would be looted, because collectors would believe that they could gain—socially, intellectually, financially—by becoming involved in such affairs. He added: “I was certainly shocked, on visiting the exhibition of the collection of Leon Levy and Shelby White at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a couple of years ago, to find the most extraordinary treasure store of looted antiquities from all over the Ancient World.”

It took Renfrew a while, but having familiarized himself with the problem and having been satisfied that the looting of antiquities had reached unprecedented and unacceptable proportions, he set up the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge, a special unit dedicated to academic study of the problem, to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation and devise methods to combat the crisis.

The Renfrew–Elia debate lasted, roughly speaking, from 1993 to 1997. Neither man could have known, going into this standoff, that the Medici seizure was about to take place and would throw an immense amount of light on the subject. For the truth is that, museums apart, Giacomo Medici supplied most, if not all, of the main collections of classical antiquities that have been formed since World War II. All modern postwar collections—and there are five of them, in the United States and Europe—are stuffed with loot, loot that has been acquired largely through Giacomo Medici and, for the most part, the collectors know it, or knew it if they have since died.

In a very hard sense, when you consider the sums of money involved, Ricardo Elia is right, perhaps more right than he himself knew at the time of his review: Collectors are the real looters.

Besides being president and CEO of the Kennedy Galleries in New York, Lawrence Fleischman was widely known for his philanthropic activities. Born in 1925 in Detroit, he studied at the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois, at Purdue University and the University of Detroit, from which he graduated in 1948, the year he married his wife, Barbara. He first became interested in antiquities during World War II, when he was a soldier stationed in France and visited the Roman ruins at Besançon. In 1963, he purchased several Greek vases from the collection of William Randolph Hearst. In 1966, he and his family moved to New York, where he became a partner in the Kennedy Galleries. His wife and he were supporters of many art institutions, including the Met, the Detroit Institute of Art, the British Museum, and the Vatican. Mr. Fleischman served on a White House advisory committee during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was cofounder with the art historian E. P. Richardson of the Archives of American Art. He founded the
Art Journal
and was a fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library. With his wife, he formed an important collection of American art and he was asked by Pope Paul VI to help form a collection of modern religious art for the Vatican. In 1978, the Pope named Mr. Fleischman a papal knight of the Order of St. Sylvester, and in 1986, he was named a knight commander of that order by Pope John
Paul II. During this period, he met Dietrich von Bothmer, who advised the Fleischmans to sell the antiquities they then had, and according to a catalog written about their subsequent acquisitions, “He introduced them to dealers who specialized in ancient art.”

In 1996, the Getty Museum acquired the Fleischman Collection of classical antiquities. The collection, which numbered some 300 objects, was valued at $80 million. The bulk was donated to the museum, the remainder—about $20 million worth—being purchased. How much the Fleischmans kept back isn't known.