The Medici Conspiracy (65 page)

According to Professor Sakellarakis, two of these three antiquities are typical Minoan stone vases very similar to others that were found in Messara region of Crete. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Messara region was heavily looted by Greek tomb robbers.

These black and white photographs comprise two of the four Polaroids in the Symes archive. On the back of the photos is written: “Photograph of head before clearing [or ‘cleaning'?] via R. Symes.”

Elsewhere in the archive, there are five photographs (not Polaroids) of the same object after restoration. Beside one photo there is a typed note: “The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, No. L.72.79.5. Lent by the Getty (head b.)”

These are also Polaroid pictures. The statue is shown in the process of restoration. The same artifact is in Symes archives No. 1996–2000, semirestored, and can also be found on the Cleveland Museum of Art website, restored, with the indication: “Italy, Rome, mid 1st century, No. 1985.79.” No provenance is given. The website underlines that the item is not on display.

This object is also shown in the Medici archive, in two Polaroid photographs. The same object was sold in a Sotheby's auction, in New York, sales catalogue, 12 June 2003, page 32–33, No. 30.

In Symes' photographs it is shown before restoration, apparently as it came out of the sea. The same object appears in the Getty museum, No. 92.AA.10. It is described as “Greek, about 100 BC., marble.” No provenance is given but the museum's website entry reads: “This statuette may have served as a cult statue in a private shrine of a wealthy Greek or Roman home. As the marine incrustations indicate, this statuette spent a long period of time submerged in the sea. The unmarred left side of the sculpture was probably buried in the sand and was thus protected.”

All this activity, from “Operation Eclipse” forward, marks a new era in Greece. Following the successes of the Italians in recovering so much material by targeting the middlemen, the collectors, and the museums—rather than the tomb robbers themselves—the Greeks are now employing a similar strategy. And, because of the proven depredations of the museums in Baghdad and Kabul, following the armed conflicts, there is a new attitude among many Greeks—as among many other nations—toward their own heritage and the damage the illicit market is inflicting.

D
R. CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE is a distinguished archaeologist based at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England. A large, ebullient man with a laugh that can be heard in Oxford, he was for ten years editor of
Antiquity
, the professional journal for archaeologists founded in 1927, and one of the top publications in its field. He is an authority on early rock art. And with his colleague, Dr. David Gill of Swansea, Wales, he is joint author of probably the most damning academic study of antiquities looting ever to appear.

Published in the
American Journal of Archaeology
, the official record of the Archaeological Institute of America, Chippindale and Gill have shown, in commanding detail, how our understanding of the past is now seriously threatened by the widespread scale of the looting and how it renders the bulk of the ancient objects in the high-profile new collections archaeologically meaningless. In short, their study shows that the whole antiquities business is a mess—a commercial cesspool of greed and vanity founded on loot and filled with deceit at every level.

The technique used by Chippindale and Gill is traditional scholarship: close attention to detail, plus stamina and tenacity in following up paper trails into obscure journals and dusty archives.

In the first place, Chippindale and Gill have calculated that over three selected “seasons,” for which more or less complete records were available, the following proportion of antiquities that have turned up for sale at the major auction houses have no declared history—they just “surface”:

New York appears to be not quite as bad as London, and although Bonhams has the highest proportion of unprovenanced antiquities, the objects it sold at that time were much cheaper than at Christie's or Sotheby's (the picture has changed somewhat since, as discussed below).

Of course, one defense that the auction houses traditionally use is that unprovenanced antiquities have not necessarily been illegally excavated and smuggled out of their country of origin. They might have come out of those countries before modern laws were in operation, then held in old collections formed many years ago, or might have been hidden in attics for many years and are now being sold by widows and grandmothers who need to augment their income. The evidence of this book flatly contradicts such a picture.

Chippindale and Gill also argue that this is nonsense. In fact, they go further—and damn it as a “convenient fiction,” in effect, a lie that suits the art trade. Looking at five modern collections (the Levy-White, the Fleischman, the George Ortiz, the Italy of the Etruscans exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and The Crossroads of Asia exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, in December 1992), they traced each and every one of 569 objects back as far as its provenance would go—and found that only 101 items (18 percent) had ever been in a previous (but not necessarily old) collection. Since there is no doubt that collectors and auction houses would give details of a legitimate provenance if they had one (because it adds to the value of an object if it is licit), this shows that 82 percent of recent collections have no such provenance.

That figure should be put alongside the fact that in four other collections where the calculation was possible, 449 out of 546 objects—82 percent again—had first come to scholars' notice in the past thirty years. This is important because the Archaeological Institute of America has drawn
up guidelines that forbid its members from having anything to do with antiquities that have no provenance and have appeared on the market after December 31, 1973.

It is therefore clear from the figures unearthed by Chippindale and Gill that the great majority of fine antiquities that have appeared in the last thirty years have no provenance whatsoever. Once more, the state of the market being what it is, if salesrooms or collectors could prove, for instance, that objects in their sales
had
been in attics before World War II, they would certainly publish that fact. That they do not do so speaks volumes.

Bluntly, the conclusions of this survey are inescapable: Very few antiquities have ever been in an old collection or anyone's attic. Instead, the vast majority of antiquities without a history have been illegally excavated and smuggled—and fairly recently at that.

No less revealing are the “convenient fictions” that auction houses and collectors routinely use to describe where objects come from. In the collections and sales that Chippindale and Gill examined, it turned out that 395 out of 590 artifacts—70 percent—were described in very vague and slippery ways. Some were “said to be” from such-and-such a place, others were “allegedly from” Island X; still others were “believed to be from” City Y, and some were simply labeled “?”. As Chippindale and Gill pointedly say: “‘Said to be'—by whom, with what motive, on what authority? And how often may ‘said to be' stand for ‘wanted to be'?”

Even when a place-name is given as a find site, it turns out that many are really euphemisms, phrases that are so vague as to be archaeologically meaningless. Instead of saying “Turkey,” dealers use the terms “Anatolia,” “Asia Minor,” “Black Sea Region,” “Ionia,” and so forth. A spurious aura of provenance fills space in the catalog, making it appear that the collector's curators, or the sales room catalogers, have earned their fee. But the exercise is nothing more than a charade, an invention generated simply by commercial considerations.

Anyone who doubts that should consider Chippindale and Gill's next move—their most audacious, and also the most difficult for them to follow through. They managed to trace the history of a large number of objects through earlier sales and collections. This involved delving in dusty archives and locating little-known catalogs with a very limited circulation.
But their efforts, it has to be said, were amply repaid and most revealing. What they found was that the provenance of many objects had, in their words, “drifted.” More bluntly, these provenances had changed, or been changed, sometimes in the most extraordinary way.

Take, for example, an object in one of the exhibitions they looked at, Art and Culture of the Cyclades, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1976, one of the most important exhibitions ever held in regard to Cycladic antiquities. Number 41 in this exhibition, an abstract figure, was labeled “Provenance unknown.” Almost twelve years later, however, in an exhibition held in Richmond, Virginia, in 1987, and entitled Early Cycladic Art in North American Collections, the same object was labeled “Reputedly found on Naxos.” How on earth could such information have come to light in the intervening years? The catalog of the 1987 exhibition certainly did not make this clear. Similarly, a marble head, number 177 in the same Karlsruhe exhibition, was also labeled “Provenance unknown,” but by the time of the Richmond exhibition it was labeled “Reputedly found on Keros.” (And that description is a red flag for any right-thinking archaeologist: Keros is known to have been the site of a major illicit excavation.) Most revealing of all was a group of marble figures—a sitting female figure, two squatting females with children on their backs, plus an animal and a bowl—that were said in the Karlsruhe exhibition to be “from Attica, part of a grave group.” By 1987, they were “reputedly from an islet near Porto Raphti.” This group was displayed yet again, at an exhibition in 1990 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and this time was given the provenance “said to be from Euboea.” Finally, in a fourth case, a statuette of a woman, part of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection, shown in The Gods Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1988, had come from “Syria or Lebanon,” according to the catalog. By the time the same figure was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in 1990, it was labeled as “from Egypt.”

These are just a few examples, but many more could be given and the implication is plain: The vast majority of these provenances are inventions—more convenient fictions that have been concocted to add to the value of the pieces and hide the fact that they are looted and smuggled.

Having dealt comprehensively with the falsehoods surrounding the provenance of so many of these objects, Chippindale and Gill next turned
their spotlight on a number of prestigious museums and other institutions that have exhibited large collections of antiquities in recent years that they must have known had been looted. These institutions were: the Royal Academy in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Chippindale and Gill are explicit in their charges. Unlike the British Museum, for example, which is (now) fairly scrupulous in avoiding any association with illicit material of whatever kind, they say that these museums are more concerned with flattering collectors who help them stage glitzy shows and who might bequeath objects to them than they are with upholding the standards of disinterested scholarship. And in so doing, they allow collectors to legitimize their (mainly looted) collections. Scholarship, they insist, is corrupted by curatorial ambition and commercialism.