The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Toward the end of the fifth century BC, vase painting underwent yet another change, in that there arose a predilection for new compositions and certain mythological subjects. Scholars now think this was as a response to a great efflorescence of wall painting in Athens, which has been lost. This is thus an added reason for the importance of vase painting of this late period. A favorite subject was the battle between the Athenians and the Amazons, a mythical precursor of the more recent victory of the Athenians over the Persians. In this new stylistic period, the human body is shown in very varied, but very loose poses; there is much more foreshortening and drapery folds lose their rigidity, to both conceal and yet reveal the body beneath. (Much the same was happening in sculpture.)

  Following the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Athens lost its market in the West. This marks the point when local vase painting began to flourish elsewhere. Apulian and Gnathian painting (Gnathia was a town in Apulia, in southern Italy) became briefly fashionable. By the end of the fourth century BC, however, red-figure vase production came to an end in all parts of the ancient world.

  Pottery is the most important material for the study of antiquity because it was produced in great quantities over several centuries and survives in abundance.

  Paintings on vases tell us more about the Greeks, what they looked like, what they did, and what they believed in, than any single literary text. Thus even a vase with poor drawing often times takes on a special significance because of a story told for the first time, or a detail illuminated. . . . In this context the average does not take away from the best; rather, like the broad base of a pyramid, it directs the gaze to its summit and supports it.

  This tribute to the “poorly drawn and average” vase was written by none other than Dietrich von Bothmer.

  Among the first connoisseurs to amass a major collection of vases was Sir William Hamilton. A member of the Society of Antiquaries, he was appointed the British plenipotentiary at the court in Naples, where he formed not one but two collections of Greek and Etruscan ceramics. The first collection, which consisted of 730 objects, was sold to the British Museum in 1772 for £8,400. His second collection was even finer than the first, consisting of vases recently excavated—and he sent it to England to be sold. Part was lost at sea, but the remainder reached London and was auctioned. This auction did much to influence taste in England, one man who fell under the spell being Joshua Wedgwood. He developed a modern version of Greek and Italian vases (at his plant called “Etruria”) that became so fashionable that at times they sold for three times as much as the real thing. Hamilton’s main rival in Italy was the Frenchman Vivant Denon, later to be instrumental in the creation of the Musée Napoleon, now the Louvre. His collection of Greek and Etruscan vases comprised 520 pieces. A tourist guide published in 1775 listed forty-two collections with vases around Europe, in eighteen cities.

  The revival of interest in ancient Greece—stimulated by the excavations south of Naples and Winckelmann’s writings—was one of the main factors giving rise to the neo-classical movement in the arts that engulfed Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. Romantics, too, were in thrall to the classical world, not just Byron but his fellow poet John Keats, who famously wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” containing the lines:O Attic shape! . . . Cold Pastoral!

  When old age shall this generation waste,

  Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  Thomas Hope, a Dutch connoisseur who settled in London in the late eighteenth century, had three rooms of his house in Duchess Street, Portland Place, filled with vases.

  This interest continued to grow in the nineteenth century, fueled by excavations further north than Pompeii and Herculaneum. George Dennis’s book Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, first published in 1848, celebrated the “sublime” and “perfect” quality of the vases that the excavations had uncovered, and collections in other European capitals, after Paris and London, began to make their appearance—in Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna. In Munich, the collection of Ludwig I was exhibited at the Pinakothek as a “Prologue to the Renaissance.” The finds at Vulci, many of which were discovered on the land of Lucien Bonaparte, were exhibited with the inscription “The Raphaels of Antiquity.” The discoveries initiated what has been called “the golden age of vase collecting.” The collection of Marchese Gianpietro Campana was formed at this time and, at 3,791 pieces, was probably the largest ever assembled. The United States followed toward the end of the century. E. P. Warren was responsible for the vase collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He settled in Rome, one of several vase scholars resident at the end of the nineteenth century, where the Piazza Montanova became an antiquities market every Sunday. With the establishment of chairs of classical archaeology in universities across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, many institutions acquired study collections. In 1898, Adolf Loos, the modernist designer in Vienna, wrote that “Greek vases are as beautiful as a machine, as beautiful as a bicycle.”

  In the early twentieth century, connoisseurship took another step forward when the British academic J. D. Beazley introduced so-called Morellian techniques into the appreciation of Greek vases. Beazley, an Oxford scholar, was “much involved” with the poet James Elroy Flecker. He became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and an honorary fellow of the Met in New York. Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art historian of the late nineteenth century (he was a big influence on Bernard Berenson) who adapted Freudian techniques to connoisseurship. Originally involved in trying to understand early Renaissance painting, where many pictures are unsigned, he formed the view that painters betray their identity in what we might call the “unconscious” parts of their pictures—those areas such as the ears, eyebrows, or ankles, where they are perhaps not paying full attention or which do not form part of the main message of the work. These features, Morelli said, are invariably highly similar from one painting to another by the same artist. Beazley adapted this method to identifying Greek vases, and it enabled him to group them together, either by attributing them to painters who had signed a few vases or by assigning such titles as the Berlin Painter or the Villa Giulia Painter where there was no signature. In these cases the painter was named after his masterpiece. Over the years, these painters could be credited with an oeuvre, even a career, in which his painting style developed, matured, and (perhaps) declined. In providing names and identities in this way, Beazley gave new life to the market in vases. His accomplishment was a perfect scenario for collectors and dealers, helping transform an anonymous mass of objects into the archaeological equivalent of, say, the market in old masters. Other scholars subsequently did the same for vase painters in other areas of the classical world. This approach was so successful that George Dennis’s book Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria was republished in 1985.

  Today, Greek and Etrurian vases still evoke great passion and are actively traded. Since World War II, seventy-one private collections have been sold at auction. In the United States, apart from Boston, the great vase collections are at the Metropolitan in New York (formed between 1906 and 1928 and added to in 1941 and 1956), the Duke University Classical Collection at Durham, North Carolina, and the San Antonio Museum (formed in the 1990s). Several major collections costing several million dollars each have been assembled since World War II. Among archaeologists the passions are no less strong, though they have to do with different matters—for example, with whether the vases in these collections have been illicitly excavated, and whether these vases were quite as valuable in ancient times as some people say. Either way, these ancient objects still have the power to evoke passionate emotions.

  After Etruria and Greece, Rome. The Roman reverence for the Greek way of life, its thought and artistic achievements, was one of the dominant ide
as throughout the long life of the Roman Empire. When we speak now of “the classics,” as often as not we mean Greek and Roman art and literature. But it was the Romans who invented the very notion of the classics, the idea that the best that has been thought, written, painted, and designed in the past is worth preserving and profiting from.

  Also, the Romans had a notion of utilitas—by which they meant utility, unsentimentality, and pride in Roman achievements—and this had a major effect on innovation in the visual arts. Portraits had become more realistic in Greece, but they were still idealized, to an extent. Not so in Rome. The emperor might want his likeness to echo the dignity of his office, but for other families the more realistic, the better. There was a tradition in Rome, among patrician families at least, of keeping wax masks of one’s ancestors, to be worn by living members of the family at funerals. Out of this custom there developed the Roman tradition of bronze and stone busts that were, above all, realistic. This is why Roman sculpture is so vivid, valuable, and sought after.

  In architecture the invention of cement made all the difference. Toward the end of the third century BC, possibly via Africa, it was found that a mixture of water, lime, and a gritty material like sand would set into a durable substance that could be used either to bond masonry or as a building material in its own right, and up to a point, could be shaped in a mold. This had two immediate consequences. First, it meant that major public buildings, such as baths or theaters, could be constructed in the center of the city. Large boulders did not need to be brought from far away. Instead, the sand and bricks could be brought in smaller, much more manageable loads, and far more complex infrastructures could be erected to accommodate larger numbers of people. Second, because bricks and concrete, when it was wet, could be shaped, they didn’t need to be carved, as stone did. Therefore, building could be done by less-skilled workmen, and even slaves could do the job. It was, in consequence, much cheaper. All this meant that monumental architecture could be practiced on a much larger scale than before, which is one reason Rome is the city of so many classical ruins today, beautiful brickwork bonded by mortar.

  There was in Rome immense respect for Greek culture. From the first century BC on, Greek sculpture and copies of Greek sculpture were found in many upper-class homes in Rome. Many of these copies were very good, and today much of Greek sculpture is known only, or mainly, through Roman copies that are, of course, now very valuable in their own right. At first, Roman generals plundered what they could: In 264 BC, a Roman general took 2,000 statues from vanquished Volsinii. Greek artists quickly adjusted, and a thriving art market grew up in Athens (the so-called neo-Attic workshops), catering to the taste of Roman tourists. Later still, Greek artists set up shop along the Tiber River. Rome itself, in a way, was an amalgam of Greek ideas and Latin ambition, but thanks in part to concrete, there is much more left of it than Athens.

  The antiquities Giacomo Medici was trading in included some of the finest objects ever produced by humankind—important historically, aesthetically, and intellectually. Many aspects of these important epochs of our past are still clouded in mystery. Virtually half of the history of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman culture in Italy has been stolen from us. The intellectual and artistic damage done by the looters has been immense. And Giacomo Medici played a bigger part in that destruction than anyone else.

  4

  CORRIDOR 17

  IT TOOK A YEAR TO LINK the two investigations at the Geneva Freeport. The prosecutor, Dr. Ferri, realized that in London there was vital evidence, in his words proof, that Medici was a—and perhaps the—central figure in the traffic of illicit antiquities out of Italy to the world’s markets. He realized that if the internal Sotheby’s documents, leaked to us by Hodges, could be matched with the photographs and other documentation in Corridor 17 in the Geneva Freeport, he could demonstrate beyond all doubt that much of the trade in the antiquities department of one of the world’s leading auction houses was made up of objects looted from Italian soil. For Conforti, too, the Sotheby’s link was all-important. He had hoped that the Melfi theft might unravel the link that led out of Italy into Europe and beyond: The documents Hodges had taken offered exactly that opportunity.

  By March 1997, thanks to parallel investigations we carried out into smuggled antiquities from India and old master paintings from Italy (broadcast on television and published as a book), Sotheby’s closed down three departments in London—Antiquities, Asian Antiquities, and Asian Art—and several specialists were “let go.” The company also stopped holding antiquities sales in London.

  Once Hodges’s documents had been used to conclude the London investigations, the originals could be handed over to Conforti and Dr. Ferri. The fact that Sotheby’s had stopped selling antiquities in London was perhaps the most powerful acknowledgment of all that this particular trade was suspect and unwholesome.

  Certainly, the Italians found a changed attitude in Switzerland, which had been shown up as a staging post in the illicit trade from both Italy and India. In the spring of 1997, after months of prevaricating, and after the Sotheby’s documentation had been passed to Ferri, documentation that proved—in his words—that Medici operated out of Geneva, the Swiss began to talk about a second visit to the sealed warehouses, to Corridor 17.

  This second visit eventually took place in July and was very different from the first encounter. The party was led by a Geneva judge, Dr. Bertani, and her assistant. Also present were two of Conforti’s men, two Swiss police, and five Italian consultants for the prosecution, including three archaeologists, their assistant, and a document expert. There were two archaeological consultants for the Italian Ministry of Culture, who were civil plaintiffs in the case; a representative of the Freeport; and this time, Giacomo Medici himself, together with his lawyer, Cleto Cucci, an advocate from Rimini who had previously defended many tombaroli, and who doubtless for this reason appeared on Pasquale Camera’s organigram. He had an assistant and two archaeological consultants chosen by the defense. That made nineteen people in all.

  The meeting was tense, particularly among the archaeologists. In the intervening months, although it may have seemed nothing much was happening on the surface, in fact the photographs of the Geneva warehouse and its contents, taken by the Swiss police photographer, had been passed to Rome. There they had been examined, not just by Ferri and by Conforti’s men, but by Daniela Rizzo, the archaeologist at the Villa Giulia Museum, and by the director of the museum, Anna Maria Moretti, who was also the head of the Superintendency (the archaeological administration) for Southern Etruria. Aware of the huge scale of Medici’s activities, as they examined the photographs, they also appreciated the superior quality of many of the pieces under seizure. Moretti and Rizzo realized that the archaeological examination of the objects in the Freeport, when it came, had to be carried out by the best authorities available, the very best scholars that Italy could provide. There must be no room for doubt about the status of the objects Medici had. They chose three people whom Daniela Rizzo would later call “mostri sacri,” three sacred monsters, extremely distinguished scholars. They were all famous in their profession, all in their fifties or sixties, and therefore well established, all world authorities on the type of object that had been found in the Freeport, and all of such eminence that their conclusions regarding the material could not be questioned.

  The three scholars chosen were Professors Gilda Bartoloni and Giovanni Colonna, both of La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, founded in the sixteenth century, and both professors of ancient italic antiquities and Etruscology, and thirdly, Professor Fausto Zevi, also from La Sapienza and the foremost specialist in Roman archaeology and Magna Graecia. Of these, Professor Zevi was probably the best known and Professor Bartoloni probably the most experienced, in a forensic sense, because she had been involved before in giving evidence at trials of tombaroli.

  That July day, as they all walked through the security checkpoint to enter the Freeport and crossed the small piazza inside,
with its black imitation-Botero sculpture, and then rode the elevator to the fourth floor, the tension among the archaeologists was palpable. Appearing for Medici were two specialists, one Swiss, the other Italian. The Swiss archaeologist, Fiorella Angeli-Cottier, was less well known to the Italian scholars. But Medici’s other expert, Teresa Amorelli Falconi, was known to Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi—she had been a professor at Palermo University in Sicily and before that a professor at Rome University—and this was the source of the tension. Amorelli Falconi frequently appeared as an expert for the defense in antiquities-looting cases. On some occasions she gave answers as to the provenance of archaeological objects that were quite at variance with the views of other scholars. Zevi refused to shake hands with Amorelli Falconi, and though Bartoloni did, she found it difficult. Having seen the photographs of the material Medici had in the Freeport—its quality, its extent, and the clear evidence of recent excavation—Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi wondered how a reputable archaeologist could even appear for the other side. “It was embarrassing,” said Bartoloni. “We kept our eyes averted.”

  In Corridor 17, the Swiss judge took the wax seal off the lock and opened the door. Then he stood aside to allow the others to enter, one by one. His own assistant went first, followed by the Swiss police, the Carabinieri, the archaeologists, and the document expert. Eventually, they were all gathered in Medici’s showroom.