9
IN 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.
This acquisition aroused concern among archaeologists for two reasons. First, as various studies have shown, 92 percent of the collection had no provenance, with the remaining 8 percent having been in other recent collections; in other words, they probably had no real provenance either. Second, the Getty Museum itself, in the form of Marion True and a colleague, published the Fleischman Collection, in a catalog for an exhibition in 1994 and then, immediately following its purchase of the collection, announced a new acquisitions policy—that objects would now not be purchased unless they were shown to be in established, published collections. Because the Fleischman Collection was now published (by Marion True, no less), this maneuver enabled the Getty to acquire its 300 objects “legitimately.”
This was disingenuous, if not downright cynical. Being in a “published collection” does not somehow, as if by magic, make illicit objects licit. Such a maneuver may put a name between the museum and the soil of whatever country the antiquities have been looted from, but that is all. Moreover, where records exist and are available, and despite the Fleischmans’ undoubted distinguished background, their antiquities collection was almost entirely made up of loot, and they and the Getty knew it.
Between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995, A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman was on exhibit, first at the Getty in Malibu, and then in Cleveland. In the foreword to the catalog, John Walsh, director of the Getty, and Robert P. Bergman, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, had this to say, among other things: “Unlike museum collections that generally try to provide the public with as complete and representative a view of an artistic period or medium as possible, the private collection knows no such restrictions. The only consideration for the collectors are, Do I like it? Can I afford it? Can I live with it? . . . The guiding factor in the selection of these pieces has been their exceptional artistic quality, not their archaeological interest.” These words are as interesting for what is not said as for what is. Surely, being aware of the widespread looting taking place in many countries that are home to ancient civilizations, one question any private collector should ask (as should a museum curator) is this: Is it ethical to acquire the objects I am intending to buy? These sentiments of Walsh and Bergman (particularly the comment about acquisition for reasons of artistic excellence, not archaeological interest) were reinforced, to an extent, in the body text of the catalog where Lawrence Fleischman was quoted as follows: “When you are collecting for an institution, you are always influenced by what the collection needs; in commerce, you are motivated by what sells; but in forming a personal collection, you know that you will have to live with the object twenty-four hours a day, so you buy only what you react to most positively.” In other words, there was a sense here that the Fleischman Collection was an entity personal to the Fleischmans rather than a collection more suited to a museum.
This is of interest here because the documents that Pellegrini found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva caused Paolo Ferri, the prosecutor, to ask several searching questions of the Getty. In turn, this produced a number of internal Getty documents to be made available. Though these were partially “redacted”—edited, because the Getty said certain parts were not relevant—the picture they reveal is clear enough.
In a note Marion True wrote to John Walsh, dated January 30, 1992, that is, two years before the exhibition of the Fleischman Collection, she wrote:
On September 21, 1991, Lawrence Fleischman telephoned to ask if the Museum would be interested in purchasing nine of the major pieces, including one group of 41 individual objects, in his collection.
True said that Fleischman’s reason for selling was “apparently” personal financial difficulties due to the weak market in property and American paintings.
The list of objects was drawn up by Mr. Fleischman himself, but he carefully selected objects that he knew would be of major importance for our collection.
The terms of purchase were straightforward: The group would cost $5,500,000 to be paid by February 15, 1992 and the price and the choice of objects were not negotiable.
The total figure was principally the sum of the pieces paid for the individual objects by the Fleischmans. The group includes—
The list was redacted at this point, save for one object, a red-figured calyx krater signed by Syriskos. Then the memorandum continues: “As several of these pieces were offered to me at times when we were unable to buy and one was sold at auction, I can confirm that their prices are basically original cost.”
She goes on:
We were offered the calyx krater, the Corinthian aryballos, the bronze helmet and ankle guards; the snake-legged giant was sold at auction; Mr. Fleischman provided the purchase price of the silver amphora-rhyton. The other objects’ original prices are not known but their present prices reflect fair market value. As you know from having seen the collection, there is no question that each of these objects is of exceptional quality and importance, and as the attached acquisition proposals explain, any one of these pieces would be a welcome addition to the collection. The possibility to purchase all together is an extraordinary opportunity. Following our discussion in mid-November, we arranged to bring the pieces to Malibu for study and photography in preparation for their presentation at the January meeting. Our inquiries to IFAR [the International Foundation for Art Research, based in New York, an organization that kept records of stolen art] and the governments of Greece, Italy and Turkey are not likely to be answered before the payment on the collection is due, because of both the shortness of time and the intervening holidays. As the pieces have been for some time in an American collection, however, and as scholars from all over the world have studied them, I think it is unlikely that the inquiries should raise any problems.
As other Getty documents make clear, Deborah Gribbon, associate director and chief curator, wrote to Fleischman on February 4, 1992, confirming that the purchase of the nine pieces for $5.5 million had been approved and that payment would be made on February 15, the deadline Fleischman had stipulated.
On the basis of this exchange, therefore, there would appear to be little difference between the Fleischmans’ collection and that of a museum. Each of the objects was “of exceptional quality and importance.” We may seem to be splitting hairs here, but the point will become clearer—and sharper—later on.
In the Dossier section we give full details of the eleven objects for which Pellegrini established a paper trail from Medici to the Fleischmans. Here, we concentrate on four, which between them underline the sheer quality of objects Medici and the cordata handled, and which pose awkward questions about the Fleischmans, and for Getty staff, most especially Marion True: Just where did they think this material was coming from?
We begin with a marble statue of Tyche that was acquired in this instance, according to the documentation, from Robin Symes. The heavily draped female figure is identified as Tyche by her turreted crown, which probably also identified the city she was meant to protect. Once again, this statue is depicted in the photographs seized in Geneva, where it is shown before it had been cleaned of the dirt that was encrusted on it. It was an important object, being purchased by the museum from the Fleischmans for $2 million. In antiquity the Greek word tyche, meaning chance or fortune, with its inherent mutability, applied to both men and cities. The great centers of Antioch and Alexandria both established cults to the goddess Tyche, but smaller towns would have worshipped her, too.
Had a statue this important been excavated legally, articles would have been written about it and published in scholarly journals. The fact that so little was known about the statue should, in itself, have been a tell-tale sign that the object’s provenance was suspicious.
More damning still was a Roman fresco, a lunette showing a mask of Hercules and valued at $95,000, which was acquired by the Fleischmans from Bürki. On this occasion, however, the fresco was associated with Medici not because of any photographs but because, in dimensions, subject matter, and condition, in Ferri’s words, it “would appear to be a twin to another fresco” seized in Geneva from Medici. In the photographs taken in Corridor 17 by the Swiss police, in the raid on September 13, 1995, the “twin” is shown just lying on the floor.f
No less revealing was a black-figure amphora attributed by Dietrich von Bothmer to the Three Lines Group (a group where the distinguishing characteristic was a motif of three short lines). This amphora can be seen in numerous regular photographs and Polaroids seized from Medici in Geneva. It was offered to the Getty by the Fleischmans, having been sold to them by Fritz Bürki in June 1989. From other documentation, we find that “RG” (Robert Guy, an archaeologist from Princeton and Oxford who advised several members of the cordata) said that this object had been “found together with” another object with gigantomachia (the revolt of the Giants against the gods, and their consequent slaughter, a favorite theme in the Classical and Hellenistic periods) that was still in the possession of “REH” (Robert Emmanuel Hecht), and a third vase, a hydria of the Würzburg Painter, “still in the possession of” Robin Symes. How did Guy know that these objects had been found together? This is a clear sighting of the cordata.
Now we turn to one final object, in relation to the Fleischmans. Among the documents seized in Geneva, Pellegrini found photographs of a red-figure chalice (calyx) krater, which was part of the 1992 sale from Fleischman to the Getty. This was a vase by Syriskos. The Geneva photographs showed the krater “during different stages of restoration.” The Getty’s acquisition notes, compiled by Richard Neer, emphasize that the vase was “one of the most exciting and important to come on the market in recent years.” It was valued at $800,000 and had been acquired from Robin Symes in London in 1988. One reason for the high value was that the iconography on this vase was exceedingly unusual. It showed Ge, the goddess of the earth, sitting on a chair, wearing a petal crown. She is flanked by her son, the beardless Titan named Okeanos (the Titans were the mythical race of giants, predecessors of humankind), and the bearded Dionysus, god of wine. On the back of the vessel, a goddess is again flanked by two males, but this time it is Themis, Ge’s daughter. Themis is flanked by Balos and Epaphos. Epaphos was the son of Zeus and Io, born on the banks of the Nile. Marrying Memphis, he had a daughter named Libya. As a result of a union with Poseidon, Libya gave birth to Balos, who was in turn the father of Aegyptos and Damno, and also father of Danaos, the ancestor of Homer’s Danaans. This highly unusual arrangement therefore seems to be about the birth—or at least the early days—of the gods and the nations they gave rise to.
But the vase was more important than even this might indicate, for the graffito under the foot showed that the vessel in antiquity cost one stater, the equivalent of two days’ pay for an Athenian soldier. As the Getty report notes, “Prices are very rare on Greek vases.... The cost of quality vases in the ancient market is a critical issue, especially for studies concerning the relationship of this medium to society as a whole. Furthermore, this graffito is the first to use the stater, a large denomination, for pricing.” (Usually it was the smaller-denomination obol.) The signature on the vase, Syriskos, means the “Little Syrian,” and he was certainly, at one point, a slave. Other vases in the same hand are signed “Pistoxenos Syriskos” and still others, dated later, just “Pistoxenos.” The Getty report continues, “It has been concluded that the slave Syriskos changed his name at some point to Pistoxenos, probably on gaining his freedom; the vases with the double signature are transitional pieces, marking the change.” Nor is that all. “The style of the drawing is unquestionably that of the artist previously identified as the Copenhagen Painter.... This krater identifies the Copenhagen Painter as Syriskos himself.... It therefore provides a valuable clue to the interrelationships of this important group of artists.”
The acquisition of this vase, and the analysis of its features, convey something of the excitement of classical scholarship—the sense of discovery and of interrelationships. This is also what justified the high price of $800,000 and confirms once more the sheer importance of the objects that Medici and the cordata traded in. But where was this important vase found? We know nothing about that.
The full list of objects acquired by Fleischman—depicted in the Polaroids seized in Geneva, given in the Dossier—shows that he almost invariably acquired his antiquities from either the Bürkis or from Robin Symes. Did he never ask himself where Fritz Bürki or Symes got these objects from? Were none of them troubled by the silence surrounding these rare and important antiquities?
There were two final pieces of paper that Pellegrini unearthed at Geneva in relation to Fleischman, but they weren’t Polaroids. They were checks. One was dated July 20, 1995, number 116, made out for $100,000 and drawn on the Republic National Bank of New York, 452 Fifth Avenue. The other was dated March 20, 1996, was numbered 4747, made out for $5 50,000, and was drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank, 11 West 57th Street. But the curious thing about both checks is that although they were found in Corridor 17, on Medici’s premises, they weren’t made out to him but to “Phoenix Ancient Art SA.” Why would Medici have in his possession at the Freeport in Geneva checks made out to someone else? And why would one of the checks be postdated March 20, 1996, when it was seized during the raid that took place on September 13, 1995? Was it to be honoredafter the sale of the Fleischman Collection to the Getty? This was all partly explained, and amplified, by other documentation Pellegrini discovered. One was a note, on Phoenix Ancient Art–headed paper, dated Geneva, May 5, 1995, which read:
This letter confirms that Phoenix Ancient Art S.A. will be responsible for paying to the bearer of the following two checks, made to us, the same amount at the same date that appear on them if any problem in clearing them occurs:
1) check nbre 116, Republic National Bank of New York, dated July 20, 1995, in the amount of US$100,000.—
2) check 4747, Chase Manhattan Bank, N.A., dated March 20, 1996, in the amount of US$550,000.—
Total ..... US$650,000
It was signed “Hischam Aboutaam.”
This seems a clear example of triangulation. This was still further underlined by another document in the same file. It was a “Contrat de Partenariat,” a contract of partnership, between Editions Services and Phoenix Ancient Art. Dated “Genève le 8 Juin 1994,” it outlined an arrangement confirming that at the sale of the Hirschman Collection of Greek vases, held at Sotheby’s on December 9, 1993, the two parties spent £1,953,539.39, in the proportions two-thirds by Editions Services and one-third by Phoenix Ancient Art. The two parties agreed that this sum was the equivalent of US$3 million and that in the future resale of the objects, the two partners would be reimbursed in those proportions—two-thirds to Editions Service and one-third to Phoenix.
Still more documents testified to the close association between Medici and Phoenix—transport notes for Editions Services goods, written on Phoenix notepaper, monthly invoices (signed) from Medici to Phoenix for “services” (“expertise, consultation,” and so on), in sums ranging from 9,500 Swiss francs to US$30,000.
Some idea of the overall importance of the objects in the Fleischman Collection may be had from Pellegrini’s calculation that the average price of their objects was in excess of $100,000. Nonetheless, the most troubling aspect is that so many of these unprovenanced objects came from Medici, and therefore out of the ground of Italy illegally. The Getty’s own documents make it clear that the museum knew that most of the objects had surfaced via such figures as Robin Symes and Fritz Bürki. The checks show that Fleischman dealt directly with the Aboutaams. Everyone knew what was going on. Yet in the Getty’s acquisition documentation, the “Provenance and Exportability” section never queries where these objects come from.
That makes it regrettable—more than regrettable—that the Getty, and Marion True in particular, saw fit to begin acquiring the Fleischman Collection and then had the gall to declare a new acquisitions policy at the museum, affirming that it would only acquire objects that had been in published collections. Marion True was well aware by then that many if not all the modern collections of antiquities have been acquired in exactly the same way as the Fleischman Collection.
The checks were a bonus, a vivid reminder of how close the glitzy world of the collector is to the underworld. But it is Medici’s bread-and-butter records that are truly shocking: remember that every object discussed in this chapter is represented in the incriminating Polaroid collection in Corridor 17.
Maurice Tempelsman, the Belgian-born diamond merchant and chairman of the largest diamond cutters in the world, was a visitor to the Classics Department of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was perhaps best known for being the companion of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. During the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Tempelsman acquired a major collection of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman antiquities, mainly sculpture. According to the documentation, most of the objects were acquired through Robin Symes.
Fairly early on, however, Mr. Tempelsman was seeking to sell his collection, and, in fact, his antiquities were offered to the Getty on no fewer than four occasions beginning in October 1982, when Jiri Frel was curator, and when Tempelsman approached the museum through Robin Symes, who offered en bloc twenty-one of his most important objects, including a number of Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern antiquities. The asking price was $45 million, and it was refused. In the summer of 1985, after two other unsuccessful approaches, Symes made a fourth proposal, this time offering eleven of the most important Greek and Roman objects, for $18 million. On this occasion, the relevant curators recommended acceptance, and the eleven items were officially acquired in 1985.
The documents concerning this matter, which the Getty made available to Dr. Ferri, were redacted to an extent, and they identified only three of the eleven pieces, one a marble sculpture of two griffins attacking a deer, the second a marble bowl, a footbath with painted Nereids on Hippocamps (sea horses), and the third a marble Apollo. As it happened, however, all three of these important marble objects were found depicted in the seized Polaroids in Geneva. There were three Polaroids of each object, “clearly photographed with the same camera and at the same time, so much so that the lot numbers on the back of the photographs are the same (00057703532).” Each object was shown in fragments, encrusted with earth, and photographed on an Italian newspaper lying on a table with a multicolored tablecloth. Because they all shared the same batch number in the photographs, Pellegrini concluded that they were all found on the same site at the same time. And in time they became the subject of an article in the Getty Journal, number fourteen, for 1986, where it was hypothesized that in antiquity the objects came originally from the same geographical area “if not from the same site.” The author speculated that the original location was perhaps Macedonia and that they had been shipped to Taranto and then to Etruria. How much did the author know?
To cap it all, Pellegrini found among the documents negatives of a visit Medici had made to Los Angeles. Among these negatives was a photograph of the man himself standing next to the three marble objects from the Tempelsman collection, “almost as if he was claiming their paternity.”
The sheer quality of the Tempelsman material is attested to by Dr. Cornelius Vermeule, curator of the Department of Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “. . . its condition, quality and aesthetic importance are supreme.” David G. Mitten, Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at Harvard, said that “the objects in the group are of consistently outstanding quality” and that several “rank among the masterpieces of the art of their period anywhere.” They were, he said, “hallmarks in the history of art.” Jerome J. Pollitt, professor of classics and classical archaeology at Yale, said that if acquired, “the Tempelsman objects would substantially raise the level of quality of the Museum’s antiquities collection and provide it with material which in some areas has no known parallel.” Finally, John G. Pedley, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan and director of the university’s Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, also agreed that some of the objects were without parallel and were of great scholarly importance.
The notes compiled about individual objects amplify this. The marble group of griffins attacking a deer (valued individually at $5.5 million) was “a stunning tour de force, unparalleled anywhere in Greek art.... This group is unique; there is simply nothing else known like it . . . this piece also provides one of the finest examples of colored marble sculpture to survive.” Of the marble bowl, with paintings on the inside (valued individually at $2.2 million), “No other such object is known to me. . . . The painted scene and its rich polychromy make the basin unique, a precious example of the almost completely vanished classical Greek monumental painting, the art which was most praised by ancient Greek and Roman writers on art . . . This piece is of the highest possible importance.... As an exquisite example of Greek painting at its finest, as well as its fundamental importance for our understanding of late classical Greek polychromy, pigments, and the techniques used to apply them to marble surfaces, the basin is of unique importance.” And for the statue of Apollo (valued at $2.5 million), “This statue may well be the finest and most accomplished piece of its kind in North America.”
So far as classical art is concerned, these pieces are as important as can be. There can be no more talk in the trade that unprovenanced antiquities are humdrum, ordinary objects. Yet in the acquisition notes, written by Arthur Houghton, under “Provenance and Exportability,” here is the entireentry: “The collection represents a selection of objects from a larger collection formed by Maurice Tempelsman, a diamond merchant resident in New York, over the past twenty-five years. The individual pieces come from a variety of sources, although the largest number were provided directly by, or were bought through, Robin Symes of London. All have been legally imported into the U.S. The collection is currently in the Museum.”
And that’s it. These were objects of immense importance, yet they had no history before Symes or Tempelsman—and no one chose to ask questions . Not the Getty staff or the experts who inspected the material. Did no one ask where such important material came from and why the objects had not previously been published? Did no one ask Robin Symes where he had acquired such wonderful material? Had no one any idea where they probably came from? Were they frightened of the answer? Or, did they already know?
In many ways, Shelby White and Leon Levy parallel Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. As a rich couple, they have devoted their lives to the arts. As Fleischman served on a White House advisory committee in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, so Shelby White served on President Clinton’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee, albeit controversially. (Since the aim of the committee is to help stem the flow of ancient foreign artifacts into the hands of private collectors, Nancy Wilkie, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, said of Shelby White, “It’s like putting a fox in charge of the chicken coop.”) Just as the Fleischmans helped kick-start the Archives of American Art and supported many art institutions, so Shelby White and her late husband provided funds for a “Shelby White and Leon Levy Court for Roman and Etruscan Art” at the Metropolitan in New York. And just as the Fleischmans built a collection of ancient art, which went on display at the Getty and was then acquired by the museum, so the Levy-Whites acquired an equivalent collection, which was displayed in an exhibition with a title no less grand than the Fleischmans’: Glories of the Past ran from September 1990 to January 1991 at the Metropolitan Museum. Since 1999, some of the Levy-White objects have been on permanent display at the Met.
And, as with the Fleischmans, the Levy-White Collection is stuffed with loot.
In a way, this should not come as a surprise. Two of the items in the Fleischman Collection, two Pompeian frescoes, not only have their “twin” in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva, but actually fit together—like a jigsaw puzzle—with frescoes in the Levy-White Collection.g
Given all this, and what has gone before, it comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that Pellegrini’s familiar paper trail also leads from Geneva to the Levy-White Collection, just as it led to the Fleischman Collection and to the Tempelsman Collection. Besides the Polaroids in Corridor 17, showing many objects that would end up with the Levy-Whites—broken, dirty, just lying around—there was quite a bit of correspondence. There was, for example, a group of invoices sent from Robin Symes to Leon Levy; no doubt Symes had to copy Medici on his invoices to prove he was charging what he said he was charging. There were also invoices from, and correspondence about, the Aboutaams.
The Dossier section gives full details on ten valuable and important objects in the Levy-White Collection in which the documentation shows that they originated with Medici. In every case, the paper trail is familiar and comprehensive, and just three examples will illustrate the overall quality of the material.
A black-figure Attic amphora attributed to the Bucci Painter (540–530 BC), number 106 in the catalog for the Levy-White Collection, appears in the seized photographs and was also sold at the notorious Sotheby’s sale in London, on December 9, 1985. It is actually a vase the British Museum would have bid on, had it had a proper provenance.h
Pellegrini’s report draws particular attention to two Caeretan hydrie, water storage vases from Cerveteri. Pellegrini found it especially interesting that the two vases were used to explain an article in the journal Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum, volume six, for the year 2000. The two vases in the Levy-White Collection were very distinctive: One showed a panther and a lioness attacking a mule, and the second showed Ulysses and his companions fleeing from Polyphemus’s cavern (Polyphemus was the one-eyed giant in Homer’s Odyssey who refused hospitality to Ulysses and his cohort). Both these vases were shown in the seized photographs, where each is broken and in fragments, with sizable gaps. In this case, however, the photographs also consisted of a number of enlargements, showing the fragments close up. What struck Pellegrini was that, in the Getty article, in discussing their construction and method of manufacture, various drawings of the vases were used, and these show the vases with the original break lines as revealed in the seized photographs. In other words, Peggy Sanders, who made these drawings, must have seen the vases either in the stages of restoration, when the joins between fragments were still visible, or she must have seen the photographs of the fragments that were eventually seized in Geneva. Where did Getty personnel, not to mention Shelby White and Leon Levy, think that these vases, and the fragments that composed them, had come from?
In this case, that was not the end of the matter. Further awkward questions are raised by certain letters that were found among the documentation obtained from Corridor 17. This correspondence was between the Levy-Whites (in fact the curator of their collection) and a Dutch authority on Greek vases, Professor Dr. Jaap M. Hemelrijk, of Wanneperveen in Holland. Professor Hemelrijk was interested in publishing the hydrie and in the course of his letter asked if he could include the photos (which, from his phrasing, he had evidently seen) “taken before restoration of the vase.” Alongside this, someone has written in hand: “Aboutaam?” The date on this letter is May 16, 1995, just over a year after the Phoenix Ancient Art invoice to the Levy-Whites. In other words, it was obvious to everyone that these hydrie had only recently been put together.
One final, but very important object links the Levy-Whites with the Hunt brothers, whose collection is considered next. This was a fragmentary red-figure calyx krater signed by none other than Euphronios. This krater—at eighteen inches by twenty-two inches, a good bit smaller than the Met’s—was the star in the sale held at Sotheby’s in New York on June 19, 1990, which saw the dispersal of the collection of Greek and Roman vases and coins amassed by the Texan oil billionaires (or former billionaires), Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt.
The Hunts were in fact originally from Illinois, where their ancestors had moved after the Civil War. One son of these ancestors preferred to make his money by gambling on cards, and he was successful enough to start drilling for oil in Texas. He was dogged for years by rivals, who claimed he had cheated them, but he came out on top and his eldest son, Hassie, built on his fortune. However, Hassie developed a mental condition that necessitated a frontal lobotomy. Bunker, being the next oldest, took over. He extended the oil business into Pakistan and Libya, where the world’s largest oil field was discovered on the tract of land licensed to the Hunts. This was an oil prospector’s dream come true. In 1961, Bunker’s half interest in this tract was valued at about $7 billion, making him the richest private individual in the world—at age thirty-five. During the 1970s, the Hunts diversified, adding to oil an interest in real estate (5 million acres at one point), cattle, sugar, pizza parlors—and silver. Inflation was high in the 1970s and gold could not be held by private citizens at that time, so the Hunts began to buy silver in enormous quantities.
Prior to their bankruptcy in the early 1980s, the Hunts had built up extensive holdings in Greek and Roman coins and vases. The collection was cataloged in 1983 under the grand title, The Wealth of the Ancient World, but was dispersed in 1990 as part of their efforts to straighten out their affairs in the wake of their bankruptcy and subsequent conviction. At that June sale, the Hunts’ Euphronios kylix, albeit only one-fourth complete, became the first Euphronios to be sold at auction in the twentieth century and, fittingly, it fetched a record price for a Greek vase, outdoing even the Met’s krater, with a hammer price of $1.76 million. It was bought by Robin Symes, who was bidding on behalf of the Levy-Whites.
Now there were four notable features about the sale of this krater. In the first place, the Hunts’ collection of Greek vases and coins was acquired though the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles. The public face of Summa was a controversial figure in his own right: Bruce McNall. McNall is another of those colorful figures—like the Hunt brothers—who populate the edges of this story. Born the son of a University of Southern California biochemistry professor in Los Angeles, McNall developed an early passion for ancient coins. This led him as a young man to the antiquities shops and bazaars of Turkey, Egypt, Italy, and Algeria. In 1974, he paid a record $420,000 at a Swiss auction for the world’s rarest coin, a fifth-century BC Athena decadrachm, and six years later he sold the world’s first $1-million coin. As he rose in a financial and social sense, McNall bought himself a hockey team, the Los Angeles Kings; and a football team, the Toronto Argonauts; and financed a number of films, including Blame It on Rio and The Fabulous Baker Boys. He owned a horse that won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and a stable with 100 thoroughbreds, and numbered among his friends Goldie Hawn, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael J. Fox, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
In 1974, he formed a partnership with Robert E. Hecht, who became the éminence grise in McNall’s Summa Gallery, located prominently on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. Widely ridiculed for embellishing his background (he invented bogus graduate work at Oxford, England, and a partnership with J. Paul Getty), McNall was twice forced to return antiquities to Turkey because they had been illegally excavated and smuggled out of the country. One involved a Roman sarcophagus that had been stripped by thieves of a series of carved scenes depicting the labors of Hercules, concerning which some of the panels were recovered in Turkey—and the matching ones turned up at Summa. The second involved eight marble sculptures stolen from the famous Roman city of Aphrodisias; and here, too, four turned up at Summa.
Later on in his career, McNall admitted his role in the widespread smuggling of illegally excavated coins and antiquities (80 percent of the ancient coins on the market, he said, are “fresh,” meaning fresh out of the ground), but by then his association with the Hunts was long over. They had met in 1978, at the Santa Anita Race Track, when Hunt had asked McNall two questions. First, “What was the relationship between gold and silver in the ancient world?” McNall had replied, “Twenty-four to one, about.” And second, “What would it take to form the biggest coin collection in the world?” Hunt was, of course, then in the middle of trying to corner the silver market, but over the next few years he and his brother used McNall, and the Summa Gallery, to acquire not just coins but antiquities as well. McNall later told journalist Bryan Burrough that he charged “close to a million” for a Euphronios cup that was “probably bought from the same tomb robbers who allegedly supplied Hecht’s Euphronios vase.”
The second noteworthy aspect about the smaller krater by Euphronios is that it wasn’t the only Euphronios vase in the Hunt sale. There was another, a kylix, that was bought for close to $800,000, by none other than Giacomo Medici. It was this kylix that was discovered during the first raid on Corridor 17, on September 13, 1995, and then dropped and broken by a Swiss policeman.i
The third noteworthy aspect about both the Leon Levy-Shelby White Euphronios and the one found in Giacomo Medici’s possession in Geneva was that both featured Hercules in the iconography. This one showed Hercules straining and struggling, locked in battle with Cycnos, one of the primordial Titans, son of Ares, the Greek god of war.
The fourth noteworthy aspect of the Levy-White krater was that Polaroid photographs of it, dirty and in separate fragments, before it was put together as a vase, were found among Medici’s documentation in the Geneva Freeport. In other words, the full route of this Euphronios was: Medici to Hecht to Summa Gallery to the Hunt brothers to Robin Symes to the Levy-Whites.
Nor was this all. In 1991, some months after they bought the smaller Euphronios krater, the Levy-Whites sent it to the Getty Museum conservation department to have the vase examined and re-restored. The ostensible reason for this was that the Levy-Whites had two extra fragments that were allegedly by Euphronios and formed part of the krater, and they wanted the Getty conservation people to add the new fragments. The documentation unearthed by the Italian public prosecutor showed three relevant points about this episode.
In the first place, it turned out that the two fragments did not fit with the krater. Second, an addendum to a letter written by Dr. Anne Leinster Windham, curator of the Levy-White Collection, to Maya Elston of the Getty’s Antiquities Conservation Department contains the following: “2 fragments (probably not numbered) are in Livingroom. Case A. They were thought to fit with krater, but don’t. Fred Schultz told me (6/95) that he had owned them, and given them to Hecht as a ‘gesture of good faith.’ Then Hecht turned around and sold them! . . . Date purchased: 06–25–90.” In other words, the Levy-Whites acquired the fragments six days after they bought the vase at auction. This is the very same date as Robin Symes’s invoice to Leon Levy for buying the krater at Sotheby’s.
Finally, here are some excerpts from the examination of the krater by Maya Elston, of the Getty Conservation Department, written on July 23, 1991.
Initially the body and the lips were thrown as one piece, while the foot and the handle were made separately.... The krater has been previously restored. 75 fragments comprise the preserved one quarter of the original. Most of them are located on side A [the principal scene], whilst the rest are dispersed over the entire surface.... STRUCTURAL CONDITION OF THE TWO ADDITIONAL FRAGMENTS. . . . Partial cleaning had been carried out although encrustation and soil deposits are still dispersed over the surface, mostly located on the broken edges . . . In addition to [the] initial damage in antiquity, some fresh surface damage can be observed on the larger shard (perhaps these are traces from an excavation tool . . . ). (italics added)
This vase too is among the Polaroids in Medici’s Geneva warehouse. Indisputably, both these Euphronios vases started out with him. This, of course, is not without significance in regard to the provenance of the Metropolitan’s Euphronios krater. Finding fresh tool marks on the fragments, did conservator Elston not ask herself what was going on?
Quite apart from the two vases by Euphronios, Pellegrini found two other objects of very great value that were once in the Hunt Collection and which were sold in the great sale of their collection at Sotheby’s in 1990. These were a black-figure Attic kylix and a red-figure Attic stamnos (a large amphora with handles on the shoulder) showing figures bathing in a fountain. The documentation showed that both of these had passed through a gallery and an auction house: They had both been first sold at the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles and then been put on auction at Sotheby’s in 1990.
However, in Medici’s warehouse, besides the kylix and the stamnos themselves, he also found photographs of both objects, but, in both cases, they were fragmented, dirty with soil, “summarily reassembled” but with many gaps and altogether in the state normally associated with recently excavated material. There were three photographs of the stamnos, “with clearly evident missing parts,” though its provenance from Italian territory was made obvious by the fact that under the foot of the vase there was some writing, partly in Greek and partly in the Etruscan alphabet (the letters HE were in Greek, the letters CA in Etruscan).
So, a new but simple question arises. How could Medici have bought the kylix and the stamnos at the Hunt sale in 1990 and have in his archive photographs of these self-same objects before they were restored? The answer was that he acquired them as soon as they came out of the ground, had them restored, passed them on to Hecht, for sale at the Summa Gallery, and then he bought them back. Why? To manipulate the market for his business.
Another six objects—all part of the Hunt Collection—appear in the seized photographs. Two were red-figure Attic amphorae, one was a black-figure Attic amphora, each shown in the photographs as “recomposed” in a preliminary way, with many gaps between the fragments and with the photographs evidently taken in a house. By the time they were sold, in the Sotheby’s sale in New York, each was in perfect condition, with the gaps filled in and properly colored.
The pattern is wearily familiar.
In January 1994, the Royal Academy in London hosted an exhibition with a grand title, In Pursuit of the Absolute: Art of the Ancient World. This was in fact the George Ortiz Collection. The lack of provenance of many of the objects in the exhibition was criticized by archaeologists on BBC TV a few days after the show opened. Ortiz defended himself robustly, arguing that 85 percent of all antiquities on the market are “chance finds.” On the same program, Professor Colin Renfrew disagreed.
Ortiz was one of the names in Pasquale Camera’s organigram. He himself has admitted that he bought much of his material from Gianfranco Becchina and from Koutoulakis, other names in the organigram. But he clearly didn’t buy everything from them, because in one of the boxes of documentation seized in Geneva, among photographs depicting archaeological material “taken during or immediately after their removal from their original context,” Pellegrini came upon a Polaroid photograph of a sculpture in nefro. Nefro is a form of stone specific to the Vulci area of Italy. The photographs Pellegrini found had clearly been taken on the site where this sculpture was discovered, “still dirty with earth and not yet restored.” It depicted a horse with rider and was typical of Etruria, in particular the markers used for Vulci burials. This horse and rider, shown in a farmyard in the Geneva photographs, was identical with one displayed in the Royal Academy exhibition. Pellegrini adds: “We must point out that in the catalogue file there is no mention whatsoever regarding the acquisition of the piece, evidently recent and through Medici, who had a copy of the [Royal Academy] volume in his small Geneva library.”
To take these collections at their own estimation of themselves, you would think that these are present-day marvels, jewels of collecting by people who care deeply about the past. Look through the catalogs for the exhibitions based on the collections and there are thousands of objects, worth millions of dollars. And yet, not one of these objects has a provenance and, we now know, they comprise mostly loot. These collections of statues, vases, and items of jewelry in fact tell us next to nothing about the past because the great majority of the objects have been ripped from their context by tombaroli, at times motivated (they say) by a misplaced “passion” for archaeology but always interested in money, and brought to market by Medici and his surrounding network, who, to judge from the markups they place on these objects, are even more interested in money, and exclusively so. It is these collectors whose funds and cavalier collecting habits, without thought for where these objects come from or how they were ripped from the ground, sustain the looting that does incomparable damage to the heritage of Italy and—without doubt—elsewhere.