5
IN ITALY, WITH ITS HUNDREDS of thousands of archaeological sites and with its history of widespread looting, a new specialty has grown up in tandem with Conforti’s section of the Carabinieri dedicated to combating the illicit traffic. This is the specialty of forensic archaeology. Forensic archaeologists, in addition to their usual activities undertaking legitimate excavations in ancient cultures, also make it their business to keep up to date where possible on clandestine digs and the techniques of tomb robbers, on which areas are being heavily looted and which cultures are being forged, on which cultures and objects are popular with dealers and collectors, on what is passing through the salesrooms and what has been recovered. They work closely with the various prosecutors and art squads around Italy.
At the most basic level, they are called in when any seizure of looted antiquities is made, however small. It is their task to establish, in the first place, whether the objects that have been seized or recovered are genuine or fake. This is fundamental and clearly affects what charges will be brought.
The forensic archaeologists are far fewer than the specialist Carabinieri Art Squads, but where they do exist they are attached to the various archaeological superintendencies that excavate and preserve different areas of Italy—Etruria, Campania, Puglia, and so on. From the photographs that were taken in Medici’s warehouse at the first raid, in September 1995, it was clear to the Italians that the material he had in Geneva consisted of many Etruscan objects and that therefore the Art Squad needed the help and advice of Daniela Rizzo, the forensic archaeologist at the Villa Giulia, Rome’s great Etruscan museum, who was well known to the Carabinieri and to the public prosecutor, Paolo Ferri. Besides her other duties, Rizzo was head of the Ufficio Sequestri e Scavi Clandestini, the Office of Clandestine Excavations and Seized Objects, so she was familiar with tombaroli techniques and the damage they can do. Another graduate of La Sapienza, Rizzo—an attractive, lively brunette in her forties—had, in the past, helped Ferri and Conforti in their prosecutions. It was she who, in collaboration with Anna Maria Moretti, at the time the superintendent for southern Etruria, today superintendent for the Lazio region, had helped Ferri to choose the team of specialist archaeologists—Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi—who, besides having the requisite academic qualifications, could make the time available to study the objects in Geneva and would if necessary make good witnesses in court when the time came.
On their first visit to Geneva, the Carabinieri had reserved rooms for the archaeologists at a hotel located between the city’s main railway station and its red-light district. The middle-aged archaeologists found this unsuitable and relocated to a smaller establishment in the more appropriate old town of Geneva. Though they worked like slaves during the day and hardly talked, they spent their evenings at restaurants on the hill of the old town, where the rest of the party were regaled at every meal by learned discussions between Professors Bartoloni and Zevi who, it seemed, disagreed on everything.
The archaeologists visited the Freeport on six separate occasions, between July 1997 and April 1999, twenty-three days in all. They submitted their final report to Ferri on July 2,1999, almost two years to the day since the Swiss had offered to make the material available. It ran to fifty-eight single-spaced typed pages.
Dr. Bartoloni and her two colleagues found that there were 3,800 objects in Medici’s warehouse, either intact or in fragments. In addition to the actual objects found in Corridor 17, there was a mass of photographs—more than 4,000—that related to still more antiquities that had already passed through Medici’s hands and had almost certainly been sold to museums and collectors across the world. Taking these photographs into account, the experts examined something like 7,000 objects that Medici had handled.
This was the first time that reputable academic archaeologists had been able to examine the inventory of an antiquities dealer with so many unprovenanced objects. Academically, scientifically, legally, commercially—and even philosophically—it was a historic occasion, and Professor Bartoloni and her colleagues were anxious not to waste such a precious opportunity.
Their report was divided as follows. A preface was followed by a classification of “Antiquities Presumably Found in Italy.” Next came a list of antiquities “Presumably Found in Countries other than Italy,” and then a list of pastiches—that is, ancient objects that had been interfered with in some way so as to make them commercially more attractive. The most obvious examples of this were vases where the gaps between the fragments had been filled in by modern restorers or where inscriptions had been added to old vases by modern forgers. Next came a list of objects of “dubious antique production,” that is, the experts could not be completely certain whether these objects were genuinely old or were instead modern fakes. This was followed by a much bigger group of antiquities that the archaeologists described as “modern-made imitations of antique objects”—in other words, out-and-out fakes. Next came a list of objects “not imitating antiques,” a strange group that might take in an inexperienced collector but wouldn’t deceive a professional dealer, curator, or academic archaeologist. The report concluded with a number of technical appendices providing scientific information on all 3,800 objects from the warehouse. It was a massive enterprise.
By far the largest group of antiquities was described as “Objects of Ancient Origin, from Prehistoric to High Middle Ages” and was itself divided into two: “(1a) Objects which can with certainty or very high probability be said to come from Italian territorial digs,” and “(1b) Objects coming from digs presumably made in countries other than Italy.” Category (1a) was clearly of the most immediate interest to the Italians, but Medici had some exceedingly interesting and significant non-Italian material in his possession.
But first, the list of objects in category (1a), the material from Italian digs. This category ran to forty-nine pages. No fewer than fifty-eight different types of antiquity were involved, from Iron Age ceramics and bronzes of the Villanovan culture (ninth and eighth centuries BC), to Etruscan, Lazio, and Campanian architectural terra-cottas of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BC, to Attic black-figure and red-figure vases of every conceivable shape, to Apulian red-figure ceramics, Teano ceramics, votive terra-cottas of central Italy of the fourth and third centuries BC, Roman architectural elements, Roman wall paintings, Roman era silver, gold, gems, and ivories. Many other categories could be added, more technical but still very important, which mean a lot to archaeologists, museum curators, and experienced collectors—for example, Buccheri, geometric ceramics, owl skyphoi (a skyphos is a deep cup with two handles, usually standing on a low foot), reticulated lekythoi, and transport amphorae.
The sheer scale and variety of Medici’s inventory was the first point that the experts’ report stressed. They calculated that thousands of tombs must have been desecrated for so many objects—of such variety and quality—to have been sequestered in Geneva. Next came the geographical reach. Still sticking with the Italian antiquities, we are talking here of material from Genoa, Tyrrhenian Italy, central Italy, Vulci, Tarquinia, and Cerveteri, all in the heart of ancient Etruria; north of Rome, Lazio, Campania (the region of Naples), Calabria (the deep south of Italy), Sicily, Puglia, Sardinia, the central Adriatic region, and Taranto. Nowhere in Italy was immune to Medici’s plunder.
The size and the reach of the looting are not negligible matters. Far from it, they are the very heart of Italy’s attempts to draw attention to its problems in this field. But it was in regard to two other factors that the juxtaposition of Medici’s holdings and the access provided to three experts could really break new ground. These were: to prove beyond all reasonable doubt (1) that this great swath of material really did come illegally from the ground of Italy, and (2) that the illicit trade, contrary to what commercial interests often say, is not inconsequential but does in fact involve very important objects. Medici’s cache represented a unique historical opportunity that in scale may never be replicated.
The most vivid evidence, leaning against the walls of the warehouse, and in one case lying on the floor, was a number of frescoes, wall paintings in red, green, blue, and gray. Some of the paintings showed women, horses, vases of flowers, architectural features of one kind or another. To Zevi, it was obvious from the style of painting that these frescoes came from Pompeii or Herculaneum, or somewhere similar—but where exactly? It would take them a few weeks to find the answer.
No less vivid was the fact that in Medici’s warehouse, 300 fragments were found, consisting among other things of architectural roof elements, decorated terra-cotta tiles, and small heads that fitted on the outside of buildings, all of which were discovered—still dirty with earth—roughly packed in Italian newspapers dating to between December 1993 and October 1994. Furthermore, they were kept together in a large wooden crate and in some red-and-gray plastic boxes, bearing the writing, “ORTO FR. CERVETERI,” which stands for “Orto Frutticola Cerveteri,” a well-known fruit and vegetable cooperative, from the town of Cerveteri, north of Rome, near the coast.
No less incriminating—when you think about it—was the fact that so many of the photographs in Medici’s warehouse, showing archaeological objects, often with dirt on them, were taken using a Polaroid camera, in particular the popular SX-70 model (two Polaroid cameras were seized, plus a regular camera). Polaroid photography was not invented until 1948, nine years after the relevant Italian law restricting the export of antiquities came into force, and the SX-70 was not introduced until much later, in October 1972 in the United States and in Europe later still. By definition, therefore, Polaroid photographs of dirty, unprovenanced antiquities are themselves evidence of a kind that these objects left the ground illegally. Furthermore, the state of many antiquities as shown in the Polaroids is such that, as any reputable and experienced archaeologist could confirm, these objects were obviously not excavated scientifically or professionally. Objects excavated professionally (and legally) have a very different appearance; they are photographed in situ, showing their context, with a measuring tool to indicate size, and are properly dated.
The professional analysis that Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi brought to Medici’s objects was detailed and cumulatively devastating, remorselessly linking specific objects to specific localities inside Italy, artifacts found in Geneva twinned with those known either from legal excavations at a specific tomb or villa, or from seizures of illicit material in the recent past, as part of Carabinieri undercover “sting” operations.
Only with such a huge find were such telling comparisons possible. For example, among the objects seized in the Geneva Freeport was an Iron Age fibula of the ninth century BC. The fibula is aptly described as the “grandmother” of the safety pin, but its use was rather more dramatic in antiquity, being employed to hold together the drapes in clothing. It became a decorative object in its own right and often identified the social and economic status of the wearer. Part of this particular fibula was made from a twisted gold thread, which is very rare. The experts pointed out that this fibula was very similar to one legally found in Tarquinia in the necropolis of Poggio dell’Impiccato, which dates from the second half of the ninth century BC. Another fibula, decorated with a feline figure, was very similar to one found in the Tomb of the Warrior at Tarquinia. In hundreds of cases the experts were able to make specific matches (see the Dossier at the end of the book for a fuller list).
In another example, thirty-two miniature cups and twenty miniature olle (wine pitchers with fat handles) were “very similar” to a series of miniature vases (especially olle) found on an official dig at Bandinella, Canino, in 1992, after the discovery of an illegal dig.
In yet another example, five kantharoi (wide drinking vessels with high handles, like big ears) and three amphorae had what are known as “cusped handles.” This is a highly unusual (and therefore valuable) design, in which the handles are embossed with small cones in a row. According to the experts, these “can be easily recognised as coming from Crustumerium,” where cups and amphorae “became famously cusped.” But more than that, they observe that Francesco di Gennaro, inspector of the Archaeological Superintendency for Rome, has reported widespread illegal digging in the Marcigliana or Monte del Bufalo area, where the necropolis of Crustumerium is located. In other words, the material in Medici’s warehouse and the illegal digging reported by di Gennaro are an exact match. This plunder is heartbreaking in that the Crustumerium necropolis has proved very important in providing knowledge about Etruscan funereal customs and the development of architectural styles, and for the study of production techniques for vases. Yet its largest sepulchre complex, southeast of Monte del Bufalo, has suffered clandestine digging on such a scale that the experts calculate that
half the overall number of burials have been plundered. . . . The overall number of the plundered sepulchral monuments . . . is now evaluated at not less than one thousand; there is carpet-destruction and plundering of the burials.... Archaeological material of unquestionable Crustumerium provenance has recently been seized (for example, in Monte Rotondo near Rome, photographs of objects for sale were circulated in Cerveteri and Ladispoli) but are also exhibited for sale on the American antiquities market where a large quantity of Crustumerium objects is on show in antiquarians’ shops in Manhattan . . . .
The experts were thus able to use the cusped handles of the vases seized in Geneva to link Medici to some of the worst plundering of recent times.
Then there were 153 Etrusco-Corinthian aryballoi and alabastra. This number of objects, the experts say, can only have come “from the plundering of about 20–30 room-tombs of southern Etruria.” And in this particular case the evidence for recent plunder was vivid. One of the small vases still had the remains of a dirt-encrusted iron nail with which it was attached to a wall of the room.
Other aspects of the experts’ great learning were applied to the methods of manufacture. For example, Bucchero ceramics are a form of vessel invented by the Etruscans and are black inside and out. They are made by firing in an oven with no oxygen. “As is known,” wrote the experts, “they were the ‘national’ ceramic of the Etruscans,” being continually produced throughout Etruria and Campania from the mid-seventh to the beginning of the fifth century BC, with an early start in Caere around 675 BC. Bucchero have been widely studied, and the minute differences in the mineral composition of the clay have been associated with different specific sites. In Geneva, Medici had 118 intact vases. “With the knowledge we have today, the vast majority of the vases can be judged as coming from the ‘botteghe’ [workshops], active between 675 and 575 BC, of Caere or its cultural area.”
The three scholars employed a different type of evidence in the case of ceramics produced in mainland Greece. As their report makes clear, the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily, together with Etruscan cities, were primary commercial destinations for vases made in Greece—in Athens, Sparta, Euboea, and Corinth. Amphorae and perfume flacons in particular were traded. However, Etruria was obviously a special area for some reason, because only in Etruria “have objects of exceptional quality been found.” Scholars believe that these exceptional objects were sent as examples, as “commercial propaganda,” to show what various “botteghe” were capable of, to encourage international trade. For example, it is known that certain shapes of vase were produced in Greece but solely for export to Italy or Sicily. The so-called Nolane vases are a case in point: They have an Attic shape, but their most important excavation sites have been at Nola, northeast of Naples; Gela, a city founded in the eighth century BC on the southern coast of Sicily by ancient Greek colonists; Capua, situated north of Naples; and Vulci. In fact, statistical studies have shown that out of more than 800 objects known, only one has ever been found in Greece itself. As the experts conclude, “One can without doubt say that the material of the Medici seizure includes an almost complete exemplification of the above-mentioned workshops.”
In addition, there was in the Medici warehouse at the Freeport another kind of evidence that the experts’ scholarship was able to expose: Even on vases of a type that could have come from Greece, some had “hallmarks.” These were inscriptions scratched on the vases after their arrival at their destination, for some as yet unknown commercial reason. The scholars referred in their report to a seminal study by Alan W. Johnston, Trademarks on Greek Vases (1979), which examined 3,500 vases of this type and concluded, “[U]p till now no vase found in continental Greece . . . bears hallmarks of this kind,” which are “basically limited to vases travelling toward the west . . . Etruria, Campania or Sicily.” Moreover, the hallmarks are scratched exclusively in the Etruscan alphabet. Some of these vases were those found wrapped in Italian newspapers.
Yet more support for an Italian provenance comes from the fact that many of these vases were intact. This all-important detail may not mean much to most of us, but to archaeologists and Etruscologists the fact that the vases were not broken is almost certainly due to the circumstance that in the Etruscan necropolises there were entities known as room tombs, which didn’t exist in ancient Greece. Almost all vases that have been found intact on legitimate digs have been found in room tombs.
Not unnaturally, in view of the events described in the Prologue concerning the vase by Euphronios, the experts devoted no little attention to objects by famous artists that were found on Medici’s premises in Geneva. In particular, they concentrated on Exekias and Euphronios.
As Bartoloni and her colleagues point out, J. D. Beazley, in his 1956 publication, Attic Black-Figure Vase Painters—still today a reference book for black-figure ceramics—identified sixteen vases by Exekias for which the provenance was known and another six for which the provenance was not known. According to Beazley, thirteen of the vases whose provenance was known came from Etruria—five from Vulci, five from Orvieto, one each from other places in Italy—whereas only three came from other countries (two from Athens, one from France). In the case of Euphronios, in a similar publication drawn up in 1963, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, also by Beazley, there were thirteen vases for which the provenance was known and nine for which it was not known. For those vases of known provenance, nine came from Etruria (two from Cerveteri, two from Vulci, one each from other places), three from Greece, and one from Olbia on the Black Sea.
The experts then added that, in the case of Euphronios, there was an exhibition held in 1990–1991, in Arezzo, Paris, and Berlin, in which eighteen vases, or fragments of vases, not known to Beazley, had come to light (this is not counting the Euphronios vase at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). Not one of these new vases, or fragments, had any provenance at all. Of these eighteen, eleven were in American collections or museums, five in Switzerland, and two in Germany. As the experts drily remark, “Paradoxically, objects which are part of old collections yield far more scientific data than objects of recent purchase.”
The role of J. D. Beazley was important in another way, too. His prestige and eye were such that, after he produced his books, even people with unprovenanced vases sought him out, because an attribution by Beazley was commercially valuable. At the back of subsequent editions of his book, therefore, Beazley illustrated these unprovenanced vases and gave them attributions. As the experts point out, the fact that Medici had in his possession vases that fall under the aegis of Beazley’s publications but are not in it invites the conclusion that they were excavated subsequent to the appearance of Beazley’s books—books that were published well after Italy’s anti-looting and anti-smuggling laws came into effect.
This by no means completes the evidence amassed by the three experts. Their lengthy report contained many other cases in which they could, for example, recognize the hand of a particular painter or the style of a particular bottega, or workshop, whose work is known only from sites in Italy, and there were plenty of other cases where graffiti in the Etruscan alphabet had been scratched on to the vases. The evidence that the vast bulk of Medici’s material came illicitly out of Italy was as varied as it was overwhelming.
“Medici had so many important things,” says Professor Bartoloni, with a mixture of sadness and anger. “In any archaeologist’s career, he or she can hope to come across, perhaps, one or two important tombs. There was material in Geneva from at least fiftyimportant tombs. To know that Medici had been distributing all this material around the world . . . it was heartbreaking.”
It is often said by those who oppose any restrictions on the trade in unprovenanced antiquities that the bulk of the material on the market is relatively unimportant and that therefore the world need not be too concerned, because the loss to knowledge from this international, illicit traffic is, in effect, incidental, inconsequential. There will be many opportunities to address—and to contradict—this point throughout the rest of the book, but here we confine ourselves to three preliminary observations. The first has already been alluded to in making mention of a number of published reports about the trading patterns of ancient Greece—for example, Alan Johnston’s study of the export patterns of vases with and without “hallmarks.” This report provides a great deal of information about trading patterns in antiquity, about economic activity in both the country of origin and the country of reception, and of the relations between the two. It also throws light on matters of taste—that is, which artists and designs were popular where. Then there was the case of the Nolane vases, Greek amphorae made exclusively in Greece for export to Etruria, a survey of 800 of which, in 1991, showed that only one specimen has ever been found in Greece. Medici had several. Think how our understanding would be changed ifany of these did not come from Italy. “Ordinary” vases—the “poorly drawn and average,” to repeat Dietrich von Bothmer’s phrase—can still tell us a great deal about history.
Second, there is the fact that the sheer scale of plunder of “ordinary” material has very serious consequences. One small bronze dagger among the Medici material dated from the fifteenth century BC. This period was characterized by the deposition of arms in water or near the summit of high places. But the meaning of these cult places is still obscure: Who can say if the exact location where this particular dagger was found might not have told archaeologists a great deal about this mysterious cult? Again, a small bronze boat, of slightly later date and seized in Geneva, was of a type always associated with Sardinian clan chiefs. This was likely to have been found with other belongings of the clan chief, all of which are lost. Medici also had five couplings from horses’ bits: This means a chariot would have been part of the excavation, much more interesting and much more valuable (a bronze chariot was found on an authorized dig in Vulci). A number of eighth-century BC axes were found together. These, in all probability, were not found in a tomb but had been buried in accordance with a cultish ritual. Who knows how interesting and important the cult was, or what the ritual consisted of and meant? This potential knowledge has all been lost. The same argument also applies to six semicircular razors found among the Medici material. The kantharoi with cusped handles, which fit with material from known illegal digs in the Monte del Bufalo area in Crustumerium, are the fruit of an illicit network that has, over the years, plundered more than 1,000 tombs. How can anyone say that the plundering of 1,000 tombs does no damage to our knowledge?
Also among the Medici material were 153 Etrusco-Corinthian balm containers, the fruit, say the experts, of the plundering of about twenty to thirty room tombs of southern Etruria. Such looting must have uncovered much other important material—all missing. By the same token, the 118 intact Bucchero vases also indicate the looting of many room tombs, all coming from one “bottega,” about which, in all probability, we shall now never know anything. A number of geometric ceramics found in Medici’s warehouse, though not everyone’s favorite—as they are rather plain—have nonetheless been of great scientific interest over the last thirty years, because of the light they may throw on the early Greek colonization of Italy and the possibility of pre-colonial frequenting, by the Greeks, of the Tyrrhenian and Sicilian coasts, while they suggest at the same time the possible early settlement of Greek artisans transplanted into Italy. The exact excavation locations and the accurate dating this permits are thus of crucial importance. Once again, “ordinary” objects are very important.
But it is also true that much of the Medici material wasn’t “ordinary” at all. On the contrary, as the experts went through the objects in the Freeport, and as their report makes clear, they found much of it “important,” “noteworthy,” “unique,” “rare,” and “magnificent.” As well as vases by Euphronios and Exekias and the Villanovan fibula with a twisted gold thread, there was a rare Etruscan bacellata (bas relief), of particular interest because it had a double inscription of ownership on both the interior and exterior of the base, giving both the first and last name, and this was very unusual. There was a very rare and important triple-handled bronze cauldron of the kind found in the antechamber of the Regolini Galassi tomb at Cerveteri and a tubular askos (a smaller vase, perhaps three inches long, used for oils or perfume and often fashioned in the shape of an animal) in laminated bronze decorated with small chains, only found elsewhere in the rich tomb of the Bronze Chariot at Vulci. There was a rare pilgrim’s ceramic flask, of the kind that comes from Veio, two magnificent amphorae attributed to the Painter of the Cranes, active in Caere during the second quarter of the seventh century BC, plus a rare askos by the same artist. A red-and-white painted biconic vase from Cerveteri was equally impressive, together with a rare oinochoe with a frieze of ibexes attributable to the Swallows Painter, who was active in Vulci. Another Vulci figure was by the Feoli Painter, and Medici had a polychrome oinochoe by him—of which only one other example is known, say the experts. A large alabastron from Tarquinia was in a style similar to that of the so-called Three-Heads Wolf Painter but sufficiently different that this must have been by someone else, an unknown painter, possibly a pupil. There were also two large Etruscanized Campanian amphorae from a very rare bottega. Buccheri decorated with “fan” graffiti were unique so far as the experts were concerned, and there were many Cerveteri vases, goblets, ladles, and female-caryatid stands that were sufficiently rare or valuable as to be singled out—seventy-five in all. The same argument applied to the Etruscan archaic period bronze objects in Medici’s possession and the seven pairs of rare Etruscan gold earrings and two house-shaped funeral stelae from Cerveteri “of which there is nothing similar known.” Other rare items included a late proto-Corinthian figured vase shaped like an owl, a single-handled Laconian pitcher, and a krater with stirrup handles with meander decorations. One goblet by the entourage of the painter Naukratis and in the manner of the Painter of the Hunt was similar to only one other known, which appeared on the Swiss antiquities market in the late 1980s and disappeared. Various lekythoi were rare or noteworthy, as was a red-figure hydria (a water-storage vase), “the only known work in this technique by the Rycroft painter.”
Medici’s material was, therefore, as notable for its important objects as for its sheer size and variety. Not even these examples do full justice to the most significant artifacts he brought out of Italy—all of it looted.
That the experts found it relatively easy to link so many objects to specific cultures, necropolises, workshops, painters, and even individual tombs may seem odd until one realizes how unique this exercise was. Normally, archaeologists are able to examine only the photographs of objects in the catalog ahead of an auction; or via a brief examination on viewing days, when several or many others are doing the same, jostling for elbow room; or when an object is already on display in the museum or collection where it ends up. One might ask whether the fact that the photographs in auction house catalogs never show, for instance, the Etruscan “hallmarks” on many objects means that the salesrooms are complicit to this extent.
The experts’ report clearly demonstrates that the vast majority of Medici’s material, excavated by tomb raiders and fed to him by regional middlemen, comes illegally from Italy. By one route or another, it had reached the Freeport in Geneva, Switzerland. In this one warehouse there was enough to satisfy the international antiquities market for two years. The question its discovery inevitably raised was this: Where—until this discovery took place—was Giacomo Medici’s treasure headed next?