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DR. 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.
Let us take the earliest exhibition first. The Glories of the Past show, held at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1990, was the title given to an exhibition based on the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection. Chippindale and Gill found that only 4 percent of this collection had any known provenance. Ninety percent had no provenance whatsoever, and the remaining 6 percent fell into the notorious “said to be” or “probably” categories.
The Crossroads of Asia exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1992, included a collection belonging to a mysterious organization, “A.I.C.,” which was never explained but is thought to have been linked to Mr. Neil Kreitman of California, who certainly owned one of the more important objects in the collection in the early 1980s and who took part in the preparation of the show. In this collection, 88 percent of the objects had no history before the exhibition but were legitimized, say Chippindale and Gill, because the Fitzwilliam show also featured artifacts from the British Museum, the Ashmolean, and the Louvre in Paris.
And in the George Ortiz Collection exhibition, In Pursuit of the Absolute, shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1994, 23 percent had no provenance at all, with a further 62 percent made up of “said to be’s,” “possibly’s,” and “allegedly’s.” That left just 15 percent with some sort of provenance, however euphemistic.
The point here is not that there were one or two objects in each of these collections that were illicit but that the vast majority were. They had surfaced recently and had no secure provenance. And in none of these usually prestigious institutions did the scholars turn a hair.
Another aspect of the trade that Chippindale and Gill highlight is the close link between illegally excavated and smuggled goods, on the one hand, and widespread faking, on the other. According to the thermoluminescence laboratory in Oxford, some 40 percent of antiquities sent in for testing “are found to be of modern manufacture.” (Fake Cycladic statues can be expertly aged, the story goes, by wrapping in cooked spaghetti.)
In the first place, few collectors appear willing to acknowledge even the possibility that some of the objects in their possession are fake. Much more important, however, is the fact that several unusual categories of Cycladic antiquities are known only from unprovenanced objects. Since it is very difficult to tell forged and real Cycladic figures apart (because the available scientific tests don’t work with stone), it is entirely possible that whole areas of this field are forged.
Intellectually, this is a very serious problem. To begin with, in the early years when Cycladic figures became fashionable to collect, all of them were about the length of a forearm. After they became popular in the salesrooms, however, bigger statues began to turn up on the market—which fetched higher prices. But because only two of these have a secure provenance and both were discovered before 1900 (now in the National Museum in Athens), and because science can’t tell the fake from the real thing, how can we be sure that any of these more recently acquired larger and more expensive statues are real? The answer is: We cannot. The same argument applies to male figures. Where Cycladic figures can be gendered, they are female—no male figure has ever been found with a secure provenance. So once again the entire category of male Cycladic figures may be fake.
The high proportion of unprovenanced and recently surfaced antiquities in a collection is one measure of the damage done by the commercially minded salesrooms and unthinking collectors. But Chippindale and Gill are more sophisticated than that. They have studied the unprovenanced objects that have been offered for sale, and acquired by modern collectors, and they have identified at least five ways in which the archaeological contexts of these artifacts are “lost.” Taken together, these five forms of loss amount to a powerful indictment of collecting. For without an adequate grounding in knowledge, such collections have no point and may do more harm than good.
One form of loss has already been referred to—that the wide spread of unprovenanced antiquities, allied to the massive jumble of fakes, means that whole categories of object may be spurious. That apart, potentially the most damaging loss to archaeology is the large number of objects that are, or are supposed to be, found in groups. Chippindale and Gill give endless examples of this, but again, two will suffice.
For example, in the George Ortiz Collection, two Corinthian terracottas, a hare and a comast (a dancer), are “said to have been found in the same tomb,” allegedly in Etruria. In secure circumstances, this might tell us something about the tomb, or the person buried there. The find spot might help explain the juxtaposition of hare and comast, which on the face of it is not at all an obvious pairing and may have an unusual meaning. But without such knowledge, the whole exercise is futile. In another case, two bronze statuettes of Heracles in the Crossroads of Asia collection shown at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge are said to have been found together in Afghanistan. They are more valuable if they have been found together, because this is rare. But who can tell if it is true, and in any case what was the significance of two Heracleses being found together? We may never know. There are many examples in auction catalogs of objects said to be found together, but who can prove this? We only have the salesroom’s word to go on, and behind them dealers and looters with a commercial interest in these things being found together, so that they fetch more.
The sheer futility of all this is underlined by yet another phenomenon identified by Chippindale and Gill, which they term “wish fulfilment.” They give three telling examples in this category. The first is a marble “egg” in the Ortiz Collection that, allegedly, comes from the Cyclades. A date for this is given as 3200–2100 BC. But without any knowledge of its provenance, or the context in which it was found, this object is actually no more than an egg-shaped pebble that may have been picked up on any of the Greek islands. To call it an “egg,” thereby implying intention on the part of the artist and a role for the object, perhaps, in religious practices, is entirely unwarranted, archaeologically speaking. It is no more than a collector’s conceit.
Similarly, the Ortiz Collection also contains several clay three-legged chairs that are described as “thrones”—the basis for this being that the objects are Mycenaean and Mycenaeans are known to have constructed objects “that accompanied the deceased to their tombs.” But without the context, who is to say they are Mycenaean in the first place and who is to say they are not something entirely different—milking stools, for example? Here again, the wishes of the collector may have taken over from disinterested scholarship.
A third common effect of wish fulfillment is to see all clay and marble figures as “idols,” interesting statuettes that played a part in mysterious cults. Usually we do not know that: They may just as easily have been toys—“less interesting,” and therefore less valuable. In addition, the very word “idol” is an interpretation; we have no idea whether the figure represents a deity or the deceased, or served some other function. “Idol” is really a vague descriptive term, and no more should be read into it.
In these varied ways, scholarship is devalued and the wishes of the collector—which may have no basis in fact—take precedence over the work of disinterested and better-informed scholars. Bluntly, these may be considered forms of intellectual corruption.
But far and away the best example of the way our understanding of the past has been distorted by the values of the auction houses and by the activities of rich and not-very-knowledgeable collectors (who nonetheless often like to pose as scholars) is the whole concept of Cycladic figures. Already plagued by fakes and copies, the collecting and salesroom framework of “art” is being imposed on an archaeology that may simply have no relation whatsoever to that structure.
The most ludicrous and revealing example of this is the practice, now widespread, of attributing this or that Cycladic figure to this or that “Master.” Already we have, for example, sculptures alleged to be by the “Doumas Master,” the “Berlin Master,” the “Fitzwilliam Master,” and the “Copenhagen Master.” In one of Christie’s catalogs there is even a reference to a statue as being “in the style of the Schuster Master.” Yet “Master” is a concept that was invented to cope with Renaissance art and in so doing contains two important ingredients that simply do not apply to Cycladic art and many other types of antiquities. First, it implies—as was true of the Renaissance—that there were masters, artists capable of producing masterpieces in their own distinctive style and good enough to be followed by other, lesser artists. Second, as traditionally used, the qualification of the master was confined to something distinctive about his style when his name wasn’t known. As referred to earlier, it was based on the ideas of the Italian connoisseur, Giovanni Morrelli, taken up and developed by Bernard Berenson, who argued that authorship in an unsigned work could be identified by little, unconscious flourishes—the way the drapery was painted, for example, or the treatment of the ears. Thus, in painting we have the “Master of S. Bartholomew,” named from a series of panels in Cologne and Munich and where the style suggests the painter was from Utrecht, or the “Master of the Aix Annunciation,” named for a triptych now in three places—Aix, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam—in which the style suggests a Flemish artist.
In the case of Cycladic art, however, this academic tradition is corrupted. In the first place, the “Masters” are named not after the defining characteristic of the artist, which sets his work apart, or after an important work by him, which epitomizes his particular skills—instead, they are named after the owner of the object, the collection of which it forms a part, or the museum where the collection is held, the aim being either a commercial one (to suggest how good the sculptor was) or to flatter the owner. Once again, scholarly aims have been corrupted by commercialism. This is not to deny that study of the artistic variations between Cycladic figures is not possible or desirable, or that there are “subgroups” among them, just that the concept of “Master,” given the evidence we have (or rather don’t have), is intellectually meaningless.
Nor does it make sense, again on the available evidence, to speak of regional styles of Cycladic art, according to the islands (Naxos, Paros, Ios, and so on), since most of the provenances attributing objects to these islands are so flimsy as to be meaningless.
Some statues are said to have “canonical” proportions, presuming Cycladic artists had such a canon in mind, and others are described as “postcanonical,” implying a development over time. Again, these ideas are based as much on unprovenanced—and therefore possibly fake—material as on objects that are “archaeologically secure.” They imply an understanding of mathematics, in order to achieve these complex canonical proportions, for which there is as yet little evidence. Under the circumstances, any concept of a “canon,” or implication of development, is premature, though that might change if more hard evidence about the circumstances of excavation became available.
On top of it all, some of the figures have been discovered with traces of blue or red paint on them, so that we are not even sure what color they originally were and how they were decorated. In such circumstances, how on earth can we judge who was a master and who was not? We do not even know if the current fashion for displaying Cycladic figures—in museums as well as in auction catalogs—in an upright vertical position is correct. They are decorated with elaborate toes pointing down—which suggests the toes were designed to be seen, but this means that the figures could never have stood by themselves. Probably, they should be displayed horizontally, not vertically.
In amassing and collating such detailed evidence, Chippindale and Gill have taken archaeologists’ arguments about the damage done by looters much further than they have ever gone before. In particular, and without letting the salesrooms off the hook, they have brought collectors and museums under the spotlight, putting them on notice that their actions are no less to blame than are those of the looters themselves in causing so much damage to our understanding of the past. Collectors such as George Ortiz have often argued that even if their collections contain loot, then at least those objects are better looked after in collections like his and are available for study. Chippindale and Gill expose that for the nonsense it is. In theory, they say, the objects may be available to study; in practice, there is little that can be done when the most interesting aspects of the objects have been lost—in the looting.
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.
It is in this sense that Chippindale’s Law comes into its own. Over the past thirty years, many archaeologists, policemen, and other law enforcement officials have known—in their bones—that trade in illicit antiquities was rife. But no one has guessed, even for a moment, that this trade is organized at the level it is, or that a number of rogue collectors, and a certain number of rogue museums, have been hand-in-glove with the network that surrounded Medici and, moreover, that these collectors and museums actively cooperated in the cordate. This is surely the most worrying revelation of all: that ostensibly honest, well-educated, highly qualified professional people—scholars, some of them—should involve themselves in such dishonest and deceitful practices, in secret and in long-term collaboration with known smugglers, fences, and tomb robbers. Christopher Chippindale is right: However bad you feared this state of affairs was, the truth is worse.
According to Paolo Ferri, it is very unlikely that we will ever again have the level of detail in regard to antiquities looting that we have in the Medici conspiracy. The set of circumstances that gave rise to Operation Geryon, the discovery of the organigram, of the Polaroids and their related correspondence, the leaks from inside Sotheby’s by James Hodges—all these are the sort of episodes that are unlikely to occur together again. Furthermore, the publicity associated with the prosecution will surely change attitudes and practices—both above and below ground, as it were. Collecting habits must change, museum acquisitions policies must change, especially in the United States and Japan, and no doubt trade patterns and practices will change (fewer Polaroids, probably), though we shouldn’t expect much publicity on that score.
Before we sum up, therefore, we must make it clear that Operation Geryon and its subsequent developments have lifted only one stone in the garden. What is true about the Italian antiquities-looting underworld is equally true in many other areas of the world. In parallel with the inquiries for this book, one of us (Peter Watson) has been involved in a not dissimilar investigation in Greece—with much the same results: widespread looting and not a little violence in the process. Given the other court cases described in Chapters 16 and 17, we can say with some confidence that the predicament facing Italy, Egypt, and Greece is shared by Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan—and several other countries. In Chapter 16, we described how the actions of the cordate extend to Egypt and Israel. Peter Watson worked undercover in Guatemala and Mexico, and we know that similar looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts is rife there, too, as it is in Peru, where there is even an underground trade in ancient human remains.
The Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, at Cambridge University in England, is the only outfit of its kind in the world. Its researchers have concentrated their activities outside the traditional countries of the Mediterranean, determined to show the worldwide nature of the problem. For example, Neil Brodie has conducted a longitudinal study of the London auction market in Iraqi antiquities, from 1980 through 2005. He has shown that large numbers of unprovenanced antiquities were sold, particularly after the first Gulf war of 1991. He writes: “These unprovenanced antiquities largely disappeared from the London market after UN trade sanctions were imposed through a strong new law in 2003.” UN sanctions, so far as antiquities are concerned, were implemented in Britain as Statutory Instrument 1519, which crucially inverts the burden of proof that normally applies in a criminal prosecution. That is, it prohibits trade unless it is known that the objects left Iraq before 1990—in other words, objects are presumed “guilty” if there is nothing to indicate otherwise. Brodie also notes that large numbers of cuneiform tablets have been offered for sale over the past ten years with a certificate of authenticity and translation provided by one emeritus professor of Assyriology. “Presumably, if a tablet needs authenticating and translating in this way, it is because it has not previously come to the attention of the scholarly community. The alternative explanation that large numbers of previously unseen tablets have begun to surface from forgotten collections is possible, but hardly credible.” The Assyriologist concerned, Wilfred Lambert, has admitted that when he authenticates an object, he does not necessarily know its origin “and he suspects that very often the dealers themselves don’t know either.” Brodie concludes that all this shows that those objects without provenance in the auction catalogs “really don’t have one, despite trade protestations to the contrary.” No less interesting, Brodie also told us: “It is also clear that through the 1990s Iraqi and Jordanian antiquities were being moved through Amman and London by means of a trading chain very similar to the cordate described here for Italy.” The names are known to police forces in the countries concerned.
Brodie has also examined what he calls the “baleful effects” that the commercial market exerts on African heritage. The plundering of Africa’s past, he says, is “intimately related” to the demand of Western museums and collectors. He notes the author’s comments in a 1960 book, for example, that “African clay sculptures are very delicate, and are rarely to be found in museums.” By 1984, all that had changed, probably brought about by an exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1970, which sparked “a collecting frenzy.” Bura statuettes from Niger were only discovered in 1983, in an official dig. But after a show toured France in the 1990s, widescale looting of Niger followed. Many were on sale at the Hamill Gallery in Boston in 2000, together with 44 Nok terra-cottas. Many of these latter came with a thermoluminescence date from the Bortolot Daybreak Corporation. Brodie said, “Bortolot’s Web site makes for interesting reading. It claims that before 1993 most Nok terra-cottas appearing on the market were fake, and that genuine objects were usually poorly preserved fragments. Then, in 1993, a consortium of European dealers organized systematic looting of the Nok area, whereupon there was a flood of genuine heads and the fakes all but disappeared.” The threat posed to the archaeology of West Africa became so serious that the International Council of Museums felt constrained to publish in May 2000 a “Red List” of African antiquities under imminent threat of looting or theft. Among the eight most threatened types of antiquity were Nok terra-cottas and Bura statuettes. In a mere seventeen years, the latter had gone from being first discovered to an “endangered species.”
With his colleague Jenny Doole, Brodie also looked at the collecting of Asian antiquities by American museums. The pattern follows that disclosed in this book—namely, that older, nineteenth-century acquisitions have a much more detailed provenance than those acquired since, say, 1970. In examining the collections of such individuals as Norton Simon in California, Walter C. Mead in Denver, Sherman E. Lee in Cleveland, Avery Brundage in San Francisco, John D. Rockefeller III at the Asia Society in New York, and others, a familiar pattern emerged—the lack of provenance of most of the objects. But there was an additional and more cynical pattern—later collectors knew far less about Asian art than the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century collectors. Brundage, for instance, would often leave his objects in storage, unwrapped and apparently uncared for. Yet the researchers found that “Brundage loved being known as an important collector.” They also noted, “In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was very little museum expertise available, and often it was the collectors themselves, men like [Ernest] Fenellosa and [A. K.] Coomaraswamy, who were hired to provide it. By the 1950s and 1960s this was no longer the case. ‘Asian Art’ was a well-established museum specialty with a mature professional structure. The art museum could provide the expertise if the collector could provide the money.”
Doole and Brodie then go on to describe one of the consequences of this situation: In 1997, the Metropolitan Museum in New York returned a statue taken from Angkor Wat sometime before 1993; in 1999, the Met returned an eighth-century sculpture stolen in Bihar between 1987 and 1989; in the same year, the Asia Society returned an eleventh-century sandstone relief to a provincial museum in Madhya Pradesh; in 2000, Mrs. Marilyn Alsdorf returned a tenth-century piece that she found to have been stolen in 1967 from a temple in Uttar Pradesh; in 2002, the Honolulu Academy of Arts returned two more statues taken from Angkor Wat.
In a 1925 publication, there were only thirty-nine pieces of Khmer sculpture in U.S. museums. By 1997, what was published of the Alsdorf Collection alone contained thirty-eight archaeological pieces from Cambodia and Thailand. Moreover, in the 1925 survey, twenty-five were stone heads and five were stone torsos. Of the Alsdorf pieces, three were stone heads and eleven were torsos. Doole and Brodie commented, “Clearly . . . it had become far easier to acquire complete statues.”
But probably the most shocking example of what Brodie and Doole call the “Asian Art Affair” (a play on the Asian Art Fair, the trade’s high-profile annual jamboree) is the experience of the German photographer Jürgen Schick, who in 1989 produced a book entitled Die Götter verlassen das Land, published in English nine years later as The Gods Are Leaving the Country. In his book, Schick provided a compelling photographic record of the appalling damage that is being done to the cultural heritage of Nepal as sculpture after sculpture disappears to feed the international market. Schick reports that since 1958, Nepal has lost more than half its Hindu and Buddhist sculpture. This large-scale plunder followed the 1964 Art of Nepal exhibition held at the Asia House in New York. By 1966, the Heeramaneck Collection contained a quantity of Nepalese sculpture, and more was acquired by the Rockefeller and Alsdorf Collections. The Boston, Cleveland, and Metropolitan Museums substantially increased their Nepalese art holdings from the 1970s onward.
Schick had intended to include more photographs in the English edition of the book, but in 1996 they were stolen from his publisher’s office in Bangkok, together with the original slides of the German edition. A random theft? Or as Brodie and Doole ask, did the book have someone really rattled?
The theft of Jürgen Schick’s photographs, no less than the action of the consortium of European dealers in 1993 in regard to Nok terra-cottas, are actions that underline the central argument of this book: The antiquities underworld is far more determined and far more organized than anyone has ever imagined.
What is the way forward? As we write, Marion True and Robert Hecht are on trial in Italy, charged as Medici was with conspiracy. Proceedings against Gianfranco Becchina are just beginning, and Ferri has it in mind to bring charges against a number of other prominent individuals and institutions. This will be the collective culmination of General Conforti’s and Paolo Ferri’s efforts over the past decade, and the world will be watching. Will Marion True be the first American curator to be convicted for doing what—one must concede—several other curators have done before her? And will Robert Hecht, after so many close shaves, finally be convicted?
The law will take its course. Meanwhile, the picture revealed in the investigation of Medici now allows us to reach certain conclusions and to make recommendations, given that we now know, for the first time and with certainty and proof, how the trade in illicit antiquities really works.
First, let us recall some of the people involved in the events described above. They include: Frederick Schultz, once presidential adviser in the United States and the head of a professional association of dealers; Lawrence Fleischman, once a presidential adviser and a contributor to many good causes; Barbara Fleischman, who was an adviser for President Bill Clinton; Leon Levy, who in many ways had a parallel career to Lawrence Fleischman; Maurice Tempelsman, the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy; Marion True and Dietrich von Bothmer, curators at the Getty and the Metropolitan, respectively; Ashton Hawkins, counsel and vice president of the Metropolitan Museum; George Ortiz, scion of a great family. These are not figures normally associated with a clandestine, underground network. Some of them, such as Shelby White and Leon Levy, have provided funds for archaeologists to publish their excavation reports. And that prompts a conclusion. It is that these individuals have done what they have because they have failed to adjust to the way the world has changed. Over the past thirty years, as was explained in Chapter 2, laws and attitudes and professional practices have evolved. People take cultural heritage issues far more seriously now than in the past, to the point where one can say, with the experience of this book in mind: It is no longer possible to form a collection of classical antiquities by legitimate means.
This is not as radical or as unusual as it may seem. It is now extremely difficult to form a first-rate collection of old master paintings, because most of the masterpieces are already in museums and the supply is drying up. The same is beginning to be true of first-rate impressionist paintings, more and more of which are locked away in museums. The experience of artworks looted by the Nazis also throws into relief the problem with looted antiquities. All the major auction houses now routinely screen their sales for paintings that have gaps in their provenance. Provenance is a major headache in the world of painting, and the salesrooms have dealt with it—or tried to—by extending their legal departments. They have taken the legal, administrative, and financial burden on the chin—because of the moral issues raised by the Holocaust. These are just some of the ways the art world, and the art market, are changing. Antiquities is not the only field facing difficult problems.
Therefore, change in regard to collecting antiquities is in the air. That said, we believe that the following specific measures are now necessary as a result of the great damage done to Italian heritage as disclosed in this book. By way of conclusion, we now argue that:
• The world’s major auction houses—Bonhams, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s in particular—should cease selling unprovenanced antiquities. And let us be clear what “unprovenanced” means. These salesrooms should not sell antiquities whose whereabouts since they were scientifically excavated by reputable archaeologists are not known and properly recorded. It is no longer acceptable, as the salesrooms have recently begun to do in their catalogs, to say under “Provenance” that this or that antiquity “belonged to the vendor’s mother” or that it “was acquired during World War II by an uncle who was an RAF pilot.” This is emphatically not what archaeologists mean by “provenance,” and the auction houses know it. Indeed, this sort of statement makes a mockery of what we now know to be the prevailing scenario—roughly speaking, 80–90 percent of antiquities on the open market are loot. The burden of proof should now be on the vendor to prove that the objects being put up for sale are legitimate, as it is with vendors selling paintings that have gaps in their provenance between 1933 and 1945. Vinnie Nørskov’s research in this field shows that Christie’s and Sotheby’s account for 70 percent of the open market in antiquities (though Bonhams is catching up), and it is up to them to take a lead in this matter. Statutory Instrument 1519 marks a start in this area.
In relation to auction houses, we mention one last piece of research, a paper given at a conference on the trade in illicit antiquities at Cambridge University, England, in 2001, by Elizabeth Gilgan of Boston University’s Archaeology Department. She looked at sixty-six Sotheby’s sales of pre-Columbian material in the years either side of 1991, when the government of Guatemala requested an emergency import ban on antiquities from the Petén region of the country into the United States. Until that point, Sotheby’s had regularly sold antiquities with a “Petén” provenance, but after that date, sales dropped precipitately. This is what you might expect. However, in parallel with this change, Sotheby’s sales saw another one, going in the opposite direction. Antiquities with a “Lowland” provenance (“Lowland” meaning Mayan Lowland, culturally very similar to Petén but wider and less specific, stretching into Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador), which had been far fewer in Sotheby’s sales, suddenly mushroomed, and in effect took the place of Petén objects. Was this another case of “drifting” provenance, and did Sotheby’s really not know what was going on? It is time for the auction houses to turn from poacher into gamekeeper.
• The world’s museums should not acquire—either permanently or on loan—or display, in any form whatsoever, antiquities whose whereabouts since they were scientifically excavated by reputable archaeologists are not known and properly recorded. At the same time, to help the museums of the New World exhibit some of the wonderful examples of Old World art, we urge the “archaeological countries,” as John Walsh called them, to help with long-term loans of their most important and significant antiquities. Anna Maria Moretti, director of the Villa Giulia and today superintendent of archaeology for the Lazio region, has hinted to us that Italy, for one, is prepared to do exactly this. In a recent statement, the Italian Fine Arts Minister, Francesco Rutelli, has spoken of the possibility of long-term loans or exchanges, but only with museums that will “cooperate.”
• Museums should not accept private collections at face value. We now know that just because an antiquity has been in a “named” collection, this does not make it legitimate. On the contrary, the evidence shows that without exception, modern collections of antiquities—those formed since World War II—are made up almost entirely of loot. By refusing to accept such collections, museums will be doing an invaluable service to archaeology and to the heritage of ancient civilizations. The long-standing informal policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” of turning a blind eye to the ugly reality underlying unprovenanced antiquities, must end. A clever loan policy by the archaeological countries would help soften the blow.
• Museums should publish full details of how they acquired the objects they do acquire. “Commercial secrecy,” we can now see, is in this area too often a smoke screen for unacceptable practices. If dealers want to sell to museums, they should be prepared to have their involvement known. Only in this way can we be certain that acquisitions are above board.
• Although its laws have changed recently, Switzerland—rather than being treated as a place from which antiquities may be legally imported—should be treated with the greatest suspicion. Antiquities that have passed through Switzerland, especially through its Freeports, and have no other scientific provenance, should be looked upon as loot and treated accordingly.
• Italy has recently begun enforcing its laws regarding antiquities looting and smuggling, after a period when its attitude was more lax. (Conforti, remember, was appointed in 1990 to beef up the Carabinieri Art Squad.) Though welcome, the country might have less of a problem if its 1939 law were modernized and brought more into line with, say, Britain’s. In the United Kingdom, if someone finds an archaeological object on his or her land, he or she must offer it first to the state, but the state—if it wants the piece—must pay a commercial price. The United Kingdom is not as archaeologically rich as Italy, but the law does seem to make looting and smuggling less attractive.
The case of Giacomo Medici proves the validity of Chippindale’s Law. The antiquities underworld is far more organized, far more venal, far more deceitful, involves far more money, does far more damage, concerns many more objects, and corrupts far more people—and far more “respectable,” “professional” people—than anyone ever imagined. Bluntly, the situation is much worse than has been envisaged. Yet the world’s museums—many of them rogues until now—have it in their power to curtail this unfortunate trade. The fact is that, until now, and as this book has shown, the world’s rogue museums have been the real looters. It is the demand for ancient objects that begins with them, that induces collectors to acquire objects they can subsequently donate to museums, either for social advancement or for tax breaks.
Copies of this book are being sent to all the trustees of the world’s museums that have dealt in these items. They are perfectly placed to clean up this regrettable business and to staunch the enormous drain of beautiful and important objects out of Italy and elsewhere.