IN NOVEMBER 2005, Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, traveled to Rome and met with Giuseppe Proietti, an official of the Italian Ministry of Culture, to discuss the issue of the Euphronios krater and the other objects in his museum that, based on the Medici investigation, the Italians claimed had been looted. After several hours of talks, a prospective agreement was outlined, under which ownership of the objects would pass to the Italian government, but the objects themselves would either remain on display in the Met or be replaced by equally important pieces. The plan had to be approved by the Italian government and the trustees of the museum, and Mr. de Montebello at first said that he found the evidence provided by the Italians “inconclusive.” Not long after, however, he changed his tune. On February 2, 2006, the Metropolitan dramatically announced that it would “relinquish ownership” of the vase to the Italian government. More than that, in documents delivered in Rome by the museum’s lawyers, the Met pledged to return the Euphronios vase plus another nineteen disputed antiquities—including fifteen pieces of the Morgantina silver and four other ancient vases. The Met also proposed that it keep some of the material on display at least until 2008, after its new antiquities galleries open in Spring 2007.
De Montebello said that the exact timetable of return had not been agreed but that a resolution did not appear far off. He had first said that the museum would consider returning objects only if the Italians could provide “incontrovertible” evidence that the antiquities were illegally taken from the country. Later he conceded that the standard of evidence he had demanded was unrealistic. “I am not a lawyer,” he was quoted as saying, “and the word ‘incontrovertible’ that I used . . . it has been brought to my attention that even in murder cases it is not used.” He added that the evidence sent by the Italians in the weeks between the two announcements had satisfied him that there was a “substantial or highly probable” chance that objects were illegally removed. The museum’s spokesman, Harold Holzer, went further. “We have been congratulated on this virtuous act,” he said, adding that the museum had decided to move ahead after being confronted with “irrefutable evidence.” This evidence, we have been told, included a copy of Hecht’s memoir with its two versions of how the Euphronios krater reached the Met. At more or less the same time, Barbara Fleischman resigned from her position as a trustee of the Getty Museum. No reason was given.
All of this is, of course, excellent news for Ferri, Conforti, and the rest of their team. The years of work have been vindicated—and in some style. Quite where these latest developments leave Marion True and Robert Hecht, legally and morally, is much less clear. Their trial in Rome is far from ending, and yet the Getty, the Metropolitan, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—well ahead of any verdict—are returning objects, acquired via True and Hecht, irrespective of the court’s decision.
In a sense, these actions—an apparent total climb-down by once-proud institutions—renders the True and Hecht verdicts almost a footnote. The Italians have already convicted the central driving force in the conspiracy—Medici—and he has been sentenced to ten years in jail, although his definitive appeal is still to be heard. Notwithstanding this, various types of archaeological material handled by Medici, Hecht, Becchina, and True have been returned to Italy from America in the past few months—all of it very important. Ferri and Conforti (and Pellegrini, Rizzo, Bartoloni, and the others) have therefore won the argument and the worlds of archaeology, cultural heritage, antiquities collecting, and antiquities trading will never be the same again. There is no going back to the bad old ways now, not so far as museums and would-be reputable collectors of classical antiquities are concerned. The auction market and the trade in New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Switzerland cannot but be affected.
But, despite this positive outcome, there are still some outstanding issues—and they all concern that institution on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where this great chain of events began.
The first arises from the Metropolitan’s claim that, in the negotiations, the Italians will accept that the museum acquired the various artifacts “in good faith.” Now that so much important material is being returned to Italy, the authorities there—in a spirit of reconciliation and the desire for a quiet life—might accept this condition. But the rest of us should be in no doubt that such a contention is manifest nonsense. Harold Holzer may claim that he and his colleagues have been congratulated for a “virtuous act,” but the facts are that the Metropolitan has hardly behaved well over the past three decades and is now trying to ease out of its responsibilities.
Consider, briefly, first, the following evidence surrounding the acquisition of the Euphronios krater:
• The most damning piece of evidence occurs in Hecht’s memoir—the “Medici version” which, we hope we have done enough to show, is the real one. In that version Hecht writes about the day he took the restored krater into the museum. “When I showed [director] Hoving the invoice stating that the krater came from Dikran [Sarrafian], he laughed and said, ‘I bet he doesn’t exist.’”
• Hoving himself, in his memoirs, Making the Mummies Dance, in his chapter on the “Hot Pot,” gives three examples of his “good faith” approach. On page 309, after the Met had been offered the vase, Hoving said “I thought I knew where it must have come from. An intact red-figured Greek vase of the early sixth century BC could only have been found in Etruscan territory in Italy, by illegal excavators.” He was told by von Bothmer that that was unlikely, but that was Hoving’s first reaction. Then, on page 315, when he was told that the krater had come from Beirut, “I tried not to laugh . . . Beirut was the cliché provenance for any smuggled antiquity out of Italy or Turkey . . . I assumed the vase had been illegally dug up in Italy.” Finally, there was the episode, described on page 328 of Hoving’s book, when he overheard Hecht speaking in Italian on the phone, asking his Rome lawyer “about the tombaroli—how many, their names,” and how Hecht laughed when he learned that there were no photographs.
Does this sound like someone buying a “Hot Pot” in good faith? There was a lot of laughing all around. In an interview with us, Hoving denied that he had laughed when Hecht had mentioned Dikran Sarrafian’s name, and that he had said “I bet he doesn’t exist.” He pointed out that it was a little late in the proceedings to say such a thing. He added some new information—that about six-to-seven months after the acquisition of the vase was announced, and because the New York Times was asking so many questions, the Met sent a private detective to Zurich to talk to dealers and find out as much as they could about the vase. The museum also sent its in-house attorney, Ashton Hawkins, to interview Sarrafian in Beirut. According to Hoving, Hawkins was shown “documentary evidence” that Sarrafian had been paid $900,000 for the vase ($1 million less 10 percent commission). “But of course,” said Hoving, “the money could have gone into his account—and then straight out again, back to Bob Hecht for all I know.”
This was all very laudable, but it was action after the krater had been bought. Hoving’s own memoirs, referred to above, and published twenty-one years after the event, seem to confirm that the director, a swashbuckling showman, enjoyed the—shall we say—less straightforward side of his job. Does this aspect of Hoving’s personality help explain, at least in part, his reaction to, and treatment of, Oscar Muscarella? This, too, is relevant to the Met’s “good faith” in the Euphronios affair.
In early 2006, Muscarella was—like the Krater—still at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. As was mentioned earlier, since his court case with the Metropolitan Museum in the mid–1970s, when he was dismissed three times (despite having tenure) but reinstated, Muscarella has never received a promotion, never received a raise, other than a cost of living increment, and even that stopped in 2000. During that time, he has continued to excavate and has published several monographs and scientific papers.
His latest book, released in 2000, was called The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures. It is a detailed, scholarly examination of the many fake antiquities that Muscarella believes—controversially—are far more thickly spread around the world’s museums than the world’s museum authorities are willing to acknowledge (this is what the title of his book means—that museums are reluctant to acknowledge publicly what everyone inside the museum establishment knows to be true). Among the fakes he identified in his book were forty-three in the Metropolitan Museum itself, including two Anatolian figurines, two Sumerian stone statuettes, and a bronze Assyrian charioteer. He also identified seventeen fakes in the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, seven in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, twelve in the Cleveland Museum of Arts, thirty-one in the Louvre, eleven in the British Museum, four in Copenhagen, thirty at Christie’s, forty-five at Sotheby’s, and two in the Levy-White Collection.
Not everyone agrees with Muscarella in his judgments about what is and is not counterfeit. But his scholarship, his attention to detail, his sheer resoluteness, has a certain magnificence. Scholarship is nothing if it is not rigorous.
Except in passing, this is a not a book about Oscar Muscarella. But his status at the Metropolitan Museum in New York does interest us, insofar as his past and continuing misfortunes at that institution are—at least in part—bound up with the Euphronios krater. For what is abundantly clear now, after the discovery of Hecht’s memoir, after Conforti’s phone taps and raids, after Ferri’s interrogations, after Pellegrini’s tracking of the paper trail, and after the discovery of so many objects—and fragments of objects—and their inspection by Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi in Medici’s warehouse, is that Muscarella was absolutely correct to say, in 1973, that the krater had been excavated illegally in Italy. The administration that has been so at odds with him has now come around to his view. It may well be, therefore, that in the aftermath of these revelations, he has a case for damages against the museum because of its treatment of him.
Now consider the Metropolitan Museum’s behavior over the other objects they have agreed to return to Italy—the Morgantina silver.
After its acquisition of these items, in the early 1980s, and when the objects first came under scrutiny, the museum said that the silver came originally from Turkey and had been legally imported from Switzerland. But of course the museum had bought the items from Hecht, whose very identity should have been a red flag, even then, given the earlier controversy over the krater. Moreover, after the Met was forced to return the Lydian hoard to Turkey, the Turks did not immediately turn around and demand the Morgantina silver—where, therefore, did the Metropolitan’s directors think the silver had originated? For years afterwards, the Met resisted efforts by the Italians to have the silver returned, even going so far, as we have shown, to send Hecht copies of their correspondence with General Conforti. And though the Met eventually allowed Professor Malcolm Bell to examine the silver, it at first refused him access, describing Bell (an internationally recognized and acclaimed archaeologist—like Muscarella) as “biased” and his arguments as “untrustworthy.” When he did examine the objects, of course, he discovered what he later said was a mistranslation of one Greek inscription, a name (Eupolemos) that had already been found at Morgantina, and the Met’s relevant curators must surely have known this. Once again, one is prompted to ask: does this sound like a museum acting in good faith?
Then there is the question of the museum’s new antiquities galleries, due to open in Spring 2007. The Met has accepted $20 million from Shelby White for help with these galleries. They are to be called “The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court,” according to the museum’s internet website. But, as we have shown, the Italians claim that at least nine of the objects in the Levy-White collection were acquired via Medici and, moreover, that the documentation associated with some of these objects reveals that Shelby White and Leon Levy must have known that a good number of their antiquities have left the ground recently and been recently restored (see above, Chapter 9 and the Dossier section). It needs to be shown, therefore, that Leon Levy and Shelby White always acted in good faith. Is it fitting for the Metropolitan’s new galleries to be named for them?
The Metropolitan’s acquisition of the Euphronios krater remains crucial for one final, basic reason, and here again Hecht’s memoir is the starting point. Remember that the “Medici version” of the krater affair was independently corroborated by others, who were not aware of what was in the memoir—such as the fact that a bronze eagle was sold to help provide funds for Medici, confirmed by Robin Symes, and the fact that Peter Wilson at Sotheby’s was shown the krater—also confirmed by Symes. Buried in the pages of Hecht’s memoir where he is discussing Medici is a phrase he used when speaking about “G.M.” at the time that he had bought from him the kylix by Skythos (the one showing an owl between olive branches, and with a youth in the tondo). Hecht said that this deal had been an “eye-opener” for Medici and then added: “He saw that quality had a high premium.”
It was a lesson that Medici learned well. During his testimony before Judge Muntoni he conceded: “[U]nfortunately people don’t know how to do this business well, Your Honour, believe me, and this has provoked much envy against me. When an object is beautiful, beauty pays . . . Medici Giacomo has understood these things.” Medici did indeed learn that quality has a high premium, and he never forgot that “beauty pays.”
As Judge Muntoni emphasized, it was only after the Met’s acquisition of the Euphronios krater—at what everyone agreed was a sensational price—that the Medici-Hecht cordata took off. It would be going too far to blame the Metropolitan Museum for all of Hecht’s and Medici’s crimes and misdemeanors, but there is a real sense that in paying so much over the odds for the krater, as many people remarked at the time, the Metropolitan Museum did help establish the climate in which people like Hecht, Medici, and Becchina could flourish, and so it did contribute—without question—toward the creation of the underground network that has been revealed in this book. We are told that the tombaroli of Italy “went crazy” when they heard the price that had been paid for the Euphronios krater and redoubled their efforts to search out whatever loot they could find—just in case. As we now know, several other Euphronios vases surfaced around then. Vinnie Nørskov’s study of the postwar market in Greek and south Italian vases supports this. She quotes from an article by the German art critic Christian Herchenröder, titled “Der Antikensammler—von Kenner zum Investor” (The Antiquities Collector—from Connoisseur to Investor). He showed that investment funds specializing in antiquities were first founded in the early 1970s—and Nørskov says this was all due to the high price paid for the Euphronios vase.
One final thought. If the Metropolitan Museum really did acquire the Euphronios vase in good faith, then its current trustees have a fiduciary duty to reclaim the sum spent from the man who misled them and duped them into buying such a flamboyant piece of loot those many years ago. One million dollars, the all-too famous price of the krater, had it been invested instead on the stock market in 1972, would now be worth just under $15 million. Robert Hecht is well into his eighties and, under Italian law, even if found guilty in Rome, is too old to be sent to prison. That may be the least of his worries.