The Medici Conspiracy (67 page)

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Authors: Peter Watson

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The results of their investigation also showed that the loss to knowledge is in fact already far advanced, that far more damage to archaeology has already been done than anyone thought, and that in several areas—
Cycladic objects, Etruscan objects, and West African objects, together with the mixture of looted antiquities, fakes, and convenient fictions abounding—the mess is now completely unacceptable. According to Chippindale and Gill, Cycladic figures tend to be found “in about every tenth grave.” This may mean that as many as 12,000 graves have been destroyed to provide the corpus of 1,600 objects currently known (140 figures have been recovered scientifically, at least 1,400 illicitly). This total, they say, represents around sixteen entire cemeteries and 85 percent of the funerary record. In the case of Cycladic art, there may now be nothing left to discover—legally or illegally.
Chippindale and Gill reserve special criticism for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. They reveal that before the opening of the Fitzwilliam's exhibition Crossroads of Asia, in 1992, they wrote to its director, Simon Jervis, requesting assurances that the objects in the show were “archaeologically secure.” This they felt entitled to do, because although the idea for the show had been mooted before Mr. Jervis took over, the guidelines of the Museums and Galleries Commission of England and Wales state in part: “A museum should not acquire, whether by purchase, gift, bequest or exchange, any work of art or object unless the governing body or responsible officer is satisfied that the museum can acquire a valid title to the specimen in question, and that in particular it has not been acquired in, or exported from, its country of origin (or any intermediate country in which it may have been legally owned) in violation of that country's laws.”
No reply was ever received from the Fitzwilliam in answer to this query, or from the Ancient India and Iran Trust that sponsored the exhibition. Later, it emerged from the minutes of various meetings within the Fitzwilliam, when government indemnity was being sought, that the idea for the exhibition had actually been proposed by Neil Kreitman of California, who had put together the collection that was to form the core of the exhibition. This was disingenuous. Everyone in the antiquities field knew by that time that Gandharan sculpture was being looted on a widespread scale. It was unprofessional and irresponsible of the Fitzwilliam to ignore the provenance of this material.
Christopher Chippindale therefore wrote an editorial in
Antiquity
in which he pointed out that the bulk of the objects in that part of the
forthcoming exhibition owned by A.I.C. were not secure archaeologically and that 88 percent of them had no provenance whatsoever before the show. The matter was then raised with the ethical committee of the Museums Association, the professional “union” to which most British curators belong, but the committee failed effectively to address the issue. Chippindale and Gill continue: “It seems to us that in allowing the [Crossroads of Asia] exhibition to proceed, the Fitzwilliam has publicly endorsed the display of antiquities which can reasonably be expected to have been looted. They seem to be taking the view that so long as the objects are beautiful it does not matter that the original archaeological context has been lost and can never be recovered. Such a view merely serves to encourage the market and private collectors to continue the destruction.” This is another way of saying that collectors are the real looters.
When Chippindale and Gill began their research, they suspected that the proportion of unprovenanced (and therefore, almost certainly looted) antiquities sold at auction—at Bonhams, Christie's, and Sotheby's—was very high. As they delved deeper, however, they found much more than they had bargained for. In particular, they were distressed by the way provenances had been invented, the way museums and collectors “join together” objects, for which there is no evidence that they were ever an ensemble, and the way purpose is attributed to objects for which there is no context. These maneuvers were breathtaking in their audacity. The attribution of “Master” to objects that are in no way deserving of the accolade was another surprise. This intellectual vandalism and indifference to the truth was, to be blunt, shocking.
It was this distress that gave rise to “Chippindale's Law.” To begin with, this was intended merely as a wry comment, a despairing joke about the naked cynicism of the trade and certain collectors and rogue museums. Chippindale's Law says, “However bad you feared it would be [so far as antiquities looting and smuggling are concerned], it always turns out worse.” It was true about Chippindale and Gill's article in the
American Archaeological Journal,
and as is only too evident from this book, it is true about the world surrounding Giacomo Medici, about the world's rogue
museums, the coterie of shameless collectors, leading auction houses, and the raft of deceitful and conspiratorial dealers. The more one discovers about their activities, over the years, the worse the picture revealed becomes. Layers and layers of outer evidence have been peeled away, to excavate a rotten core within, a core that not even its worst critics imagined. It is now time to sum up this core in all its stinking glory.
Let us be frank about the picture revealed during the detective work leading to Medici's trial. It has shown and confirmed the following facts:
• We may begin with the sheer scale of the looting. Medici had close to 4,000 objects in his warehouse in Geneva and photographs relating to another 4,000; Robin Symes had 17,000 objects in his thirty-three warehouses; and the woodcutter, Giuseppe Evangelisti, looted on average a tomb a week, with nine objects being unearthed per tomb. Pasquale Camera's organigram referred to a core of a dozen tombaroli but in the course of his investigations, Paolo Ferri came across hundreds of other names. If each of these were as active as Evangelisti (and why should we doubt it?), then thousands of antiquities were leaving the ground of Italy illegally each week. Ferri, of course, has by no means interviewed—or even become aware of—many other tombaroli. We have left out a lot of names encountered in the documentation. All this means that the scale of the illicit trade is enormous. No one can doubt it now, and the convenient fiction that unprovenanced antiquities have come from some ancient relative's attic must be laid to rest, once and for all. In the separate trial of Raffaele Monticelli, also mentioned in Pasquale Camera's organigram, held in Foggia in 2003, in which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to four years, it was revealed that some tombaroli receive regular salaries rather than being paid only for their discoveries. For them, looting is a full-time job. According to one academic study, there are now as many Apulian pots in North America as there are in the museums of Italy—another measure of the “achievement” of Medici and those like him.
• Maurizio Pellegrini, Daniela Rizzo, and Paolo Ferri made calculations based on the report of Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi, together with the activities of those names identified through Operation Geryon
and the interviews with tombaroli such as Casasanta and Evangelisti. They concluded that somewhere in the region of 100,000 tombs have been excavated since Medici and Hecht built up their cordata.
• The tombaroli, as do many “collectors,” like to pretend that they “love” antiquities, that they excavate carefully, that they preserve sites. This is false, and everyone concerned knows it. The scandal of the Pompeian frescoes shows that the likes of Medici, and those who supply him, do not care in the slightest about the damage they do. Not even Marion True, or Robin Symes, thought that these frescoes could be sold. No one thought they would be able to get away with displaying such obvious examples of loot—hacking them off the walls of the villa they had adorned had done too much damage to the structures where they had been embedded. The same applies to the capitals stolen from Ostia Antica that were deliberately damaged to “disguise” them. In our television program about Sotheby's and smuggled goods, we had filmed a nighttime “excavation” that had in fact been carried out by means of a mechanical digger—this was hardly a sensitive “dig.” It was more like a rape. Pietro Casasanta, the tomb robber who found the ivory head, liked to say that he “excavated” villas and did not “plunder” tombs, yet Daniela Rizzo has had to pick up the pieces more than once after his illegal digs have been discovered. She confirms that Casasanta did enormous damage to the sites he “excavated.” In fact, she says that he was too ignorant—archaeologically speaking—to realize the damage he was doing.
• The fiction that the traffic in illicit antiquities concerns unimportant objects has been exploded. The traffic is in fact kept in business by the interest—and demand—from some of the world's leading rogue museums and a number of rogue collectors who are interested only in very important items. The illicit traffic has provided objects for at least five of the so-called great modern collections: those of the Levy-Whites, George Ortiz, the Hunt brothers, Maurice Tempelsman, and Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. It has also filled several of the world's leading museums. The traffic in illicit antiquities has involved hundreds if not thousands of museum-quality pieces.
The recent research of the Danish scholar Vinnie Nørskov supports—in a statistical way—many of our findings. In her book
Greek Vases in New Contexts
(2002), she concludes that in regard to ancient vases, an “invisible” market has developed. She quotes several instances to show what she means. She reveals, for instance, that the most important vases acquired by museums never appear on the auction market. In fact, the first $1 million price tag for an antiquity at auction wasn't reached until 1988, sixteen years after the trade of the Euphronios krater, by which time at least three antiquities had been sold privately to museums for well beyond that price. From the evidence in this book, we can now say that far more than three antiquities surpassed this figure—there were at least another five and maybe more. Nørskov also concluded that “the vase market has been much larger than the market described through sales catalogues.”
She also found two other long-term trends. First, there was a rise in the number of south Italian vases sold at auction, which grew from the beginning of the 1970s and dropped off in the 1990s. This no doubt had something to do with the publication of Dale Trendall's scholarly works on the painters of south Italian vases, but of course it was also
exactly
the time when the Medici cordata was active. After Medici saw—as he put it in his trial—that “beauty pays,” he began to be more active, around the time of the Euphronios krater affair, and more concerned with quality. His activities effectively ended when his Freeport warehouse was sealed at the end of 1995. His period of activity and the dominance of south Italian vases sold at auction overlap uncannily.
Nørskov's second point is that since around 1988, the number of vases
resold
on the auction market has snowballed, rocketing from virtually zero to more than 20 percent. There could be many reasons for this, of course, but it is not inconsistent with unscrupulous dealers buying back and reselling vases to launder them and bolster prices.
• It is true that many objects of lesser importance appear at auction, but the antiquities auctions—we now know—serve several specific purposes. Apart from their legitimate function, they exist to “launder” antiquities, so that dealers like Medici can claim that they have bought (what are in fact their own) objects on open sale, providing these objects,
therefore, with a spurious provenance. These sales provide a benchmark for value—Medici (and how many others?) bid against themselves at auction to maintain the price of basic objects, against which other values can be calculated. And in offering only relatively run-of-the-mill items, the auctions helped establish the fiction that however lacking in provenance these objects are, the “antiquities trade” concerns only unimportant material.
• But far and away the most serious revelation of the Medici inquiry, and the one that supports the premise of Chippindale's Law more than any other, is the fact that the illicit trade in antiquities
is organized
. It is organized into groups—cordate, teams of people “roped” together—so as to achieve one all-important objective. This is to keep the likes of Medici, an Italian citizen who is responsible for smuggling thousands of ancient artifacts out of Italy, at a distance from the world's major museums, and collectors, so they can deny dealing directly with the underground trade. This is the tactic that in political spin-doctoring is called “deniability.” Such deniability is achieved by means of triangulations—indirect routes that camouflage the actual origin of the objects. There is no need to repeat the detail here, except to reaffirm what Judge Muntoni concluded—that this was nothing less than a criminal conspiracy.
• An aspect of this organization is delay. There will be those who object to the trials of Giacomo Medici, Robert Hecht, and Marion True on the grounds that the events concerned all took place many years ago. There are several answers to this. One is that law enforcement agencies can only deal with the material available. Although many archaeologists—such as Chippindale and Gill—have argued for years that the circumstantial evidence all points to the conclusion that the vast majority of unprovenanced antiquities in museums around the world and in almost all the modern collections have been looted, both museums and the trade have resisted this reasoning. Hecht himself has said more than once that without documentary proof, he refuses to accept that the objects he deals in are looted. The evidence of Operation Geryon shows that it required both luck and clever investigation to lay bare the
organization surrounding Medici. The documentary proof of the extent of the looting is now there for all to see.
Another answer is that following the landmark ruling in the Frederick Schultz case, in 2002,
ap
antiquities looted from countries that have legislation stipulating that objects in the ground belong to that country are deemed to have been stolen—and under U.S. law, derived from British law, good title can
never
be obtained to stolen goods. So it doesn't matter how long cases take to come to court: Looted antiquities remain looted.
Yet another answer is that investigation on an international level is unwieldy and cumbersome, and therefore takes time. As this book has shown, it can take months, if not years, for questions to foreign nationals to be answered. In such circumstances, it is inevitable that prosecutions will take years to mature. This must now be accepted as a fact of life.
But we must also remember that delay is not exactly anathema to the underground trade. Objects that are held unseen in warehouses for months and years on end are, when they do surface, more difficult to match to clandestine excavations, which may have been discovered in the interim by law enforcement authorities. Before the 2002 decision by the U.S. courts, the illicit trade was often protected by the fact that statutes of limitations would come into force, preventing legal actions from being initiated (a defense that the Metropolitan Museum tried, unsuccessfully, in the case of the Lydian hoard).
aq
As was mentioned in Chapter 15, the acquisition of fragments of vases strings out the process, making it more difficult for countries such as Italy to mount claims for these objects. The very fact that it is necessary to write in this way shows that delay, in and of itself, softens attitudes. Illegal actions of the 1980s, say, are seen as less vivid, less urgent, in some way less wrong than events of a more recent date. A moment's reflection will show that such reasoning cannot be correct. If the underground trade thinks that by delaying it can deflect the interest of law enforcement, then law enforcement agencies must insist on the opposite truth.
• In an effort to put this whole matter into context, Dr. Ferri calculated that the market price of all the objects mentioned in this book total somewhere in the region of $100 million. This is an impressive sum but still considerably less than the value Robin Symes put on his holdings, which, at $210 million, is more than twice that. According to Ferri, however, Gianfranco Becchina, whose trial will follow that of Marion True and Robert Hecht, may well have been as active as Medici, so that if his trading is taken into account, along with Savoca's, then Ferri calculates that these few names were controlling illicit traffic in antiquities easily worth $500 million—
half a billion dollars
. It is an enormous, underground business.

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