by Peter Watson
According to Pellegrini, Medici was the origin of quite a few objects in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Just two give a flavor. The first is made up of two antefixes showing Maenades and Silenus. An antefix was a roof decoration in antiquity, usually an upright ornament, and it was intended to conceal the joints between rows of tiles and to protect the gaps from the weather. A maenades was a female satyr, and a silenus a male one.1 These antefixes, which are now in several museums of the world, not just Copenhagen, are much better than anything in the Villa Giulia, for example, and all appear in the Polaroids seized in the Geneva Freeport. The fact that the antefixes in Copenhagen and the Getty, and in Medici’s Polaroids, show the ceramics to have been burned in part, may indicate that the temple was attacked or abandoned, possibly an important event in antiquity that, now, we shall probably never know anything about.
The second set of documents relates to parts of an Etruscan chariot—in particular, some incised bas-relief plates with sleeping lions, together with parts of the bridles and the wheels. The documentation shows that Medici sold these to Robert Hecht, possibly in the 1970s, for $67,000. Hecht then sold them on to the Copenhagen museum for 1.2 million Swiss francs (approximately $900,000).
Pellegrini’s detective work also showed that in terms of sheer numbers, the Museum for Classical Antiquities in Berlin was just as bad as the Met. From the photographs found in Medici’s possession in Geneva, there was a series of seven vases that originated with him that were acquired by Berlin.2
Robert Hecht, in highly unusual and revealing circumstances, subsequently admitted to having sold looted material to several other museums besides the ones considered so far. These others include the Glyptotek in Munich, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cleveland Museum in Ohio, the Harvard Museum system in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Campbell’s Soup Museum in Camden, New Jersey, the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, the Louvre in Paris, and (once) the British Museum in London. We do not have the same level of detail for these acquisitions as we do for the acquisitions reported so far, but we see no reason to doubt what Hecht says: Most of the material he placed with these museums came from Medici (or possibly Becchina), in which case it will, almost certainly, consist of loot. At the same time, in the absence of detailed internal documentation from these museums, it is unclear who knew what and at what time in these institutions concerning the origin of these items.
You might think that it would be good practice for the network of dealers that surrounded Medici, based as it was in Switzerland, to steer clear of Swiss museums when it came to trading in illicit goods. Not at all. The head of archaeology at the Geneva Art and History Museum, Jacques Chamay, for instance, was involved with the Medici vases sold to Berlin.
Furthermore, from the material seized in Geneva, but in this case also from additional material seized at Medici’s homes in Santa Marinella, north of Rome, and from his apartment in Geneva, the Carabinieri discovered that Medici received assistance from an unusual source. She was Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, a Swiss archaeologist who, ostensibly, worked for Swiss customs. It was she who, beginning in 1980 and continuing certainly until Medici’s trial in 2003, authenticated thousands of objects. Acting in an official capacity, it was her job to issue certificates of authenticity and provide evaluations for tax purposes should the objects be imported permanently into Switzerland. She also issued passavant documents, essentially temporary import certificates that enabled, for example, an antiquity to be restored at the Bürkis’ Zurich laboratory and then returned to the Freeport without requiring any payment of duty. In the first instance, Pellegrini found that some of her descriptions of objects were so vague that one could never be certain that the object returned to the Freeport was the same as the one that had left. Her expertise enabled Medici to show that the objects he was dealing in were genuine and not fakes. It seems she must have turned a blind eye to where these objects were coming from. The fact that these antiquities—or most of them—were genuine satisfied the Swiss concern that the Freeport might be being used in some sort of widespread antiquities faking operation. But of course Cottier-Angeli’s certificates of authenticity doubly suited Medici because, besides authenticating the objects, she provided documentary proof that the objects had been in Switzerland, and exported from there, ostensibly legally.
Over the years, however, Cottier-Angeli became rather more than a consultant on behalf of Swiss customs. Frida Tchacos told Ferri that Cottier-Angeli had the keys to Medici’s warehouses and that she herself was dealing in objects acquired from him. (Cottier-Angeli later denied this.) Among the documents, for instance, Pellegrini found an envelope marked “111,” inside which was a small handwritten exercise book “in which Medici indicates a deposit (in the sense of a warehouse) in which two objects were being kept—a bronze candelabrum with a youth and a small pig, and a stamnos attributed to Kleophon.” Elsewhere in the documents, Pellegrini found a photograph of a candelabrum with the same subject (a youth and a small pig), bearing the words: “venduto C.A.” (“sold C.A.”)—C.A. here being Cottier-Angeli. The same candelabrum was depicted in the photographs relating to the inventory of the Hydra Gallery during the 1986 proceedings, drawn up by the law firm of Piguet.e In Medici’s notebooks, many objects were sold to “Madame,” a term that was interchangeable with “C.A.”
The closeness of the relationship is further underlined by the fact that Pellegrini found that Cottier-Angeli was a member of the scientific directors for an exhibition held in Jerusalem in 1991, titled Italy of the Etruscans. She was listed in the catalog as one of the organizers for this exhibition, and she contributed to the text. Pellegrini established that various objects displayed in Jerusalem were once in Medici’s possession. Several of them are to be found in the seized photographs, many in a state prior to restoration. Once again, among these objects is a bronze candelabrum, with a youth and small pig, where it is indicated as belonging to a Swiss collection, “A. P.” This, Pellegrini discovered, refers to Alain Patry, a man who audits the accounts for the “Hellas et Roma” Association in Geneva. This association was founded by Cottier-Angeli, and its coordinator is—or was then—Pierre Cottier, her husband. A second example concerned an exhibition, Homère chez Calvin (Homer in the Land of Calvin), held at the Art and History Museum in Geneva in 2000–2001, cosponsored by the Municipal Department for Cultural Affairs of the City of Geneva, and the “Hellas et Roma” Association. Among the illustrations in the catalog of this exhibition is a photograph of an Apulian chalice-krater showing an episode from the Trojan War, a scene outside the walls of Troy, with many episodes of battle, men with shields and spears, and women watching. The caption lists the krater as belonging to a Swiss private collection, yet this same object is depicted in the photographs seized from Medici, where it is shown in fragments before being restored.
This is enough about the exhibition at the Art and History Museum in Geneva for the moment. But as with the Getty, as with the Met, as with the German museums, we are not yet quite finished with Fiorella Cottier-Angeli or Jacques Chamay.
9
“COLLECTORS ARE THE REAL LOOTERS”
IN 1993, RICARDO ELIA, an archaeologist from Boston University, wrote a book review in the pages of Archaeology magazine, the forum of the Archaeological Institute of America, the institution to which most U.S.-based professional archaeologists belong. The review was titled “A Seductive and Troubling Work,” and its subject was a catalog that had just been published, The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection, by Colin Renfrew, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University in England. Cambridge boasts the oldest archaeology department of any university in Western Europe or North America, and Colin Renfrew was (and is) probably the greatest archaeologist of his generation.
Born in 1937, Renfrew is the author of at least three seminal works in archaeology. The first was The Emergence of Civilisation, an examination of the Cyclades in the third millennium BC, which challenged accepted no
tions of how civilization developed. The second was Before Civilisation, an analysis of the radiocarbon revolution in the subject, which challenged the assumption that prehistoric cultural innovation originated in the Near East and then spread to Western Europe. And the third was Archaeology and Language, which examined the notion of whether there has ever been a “mother tongue,” a proto-language spoken by most of mankind’s early peoples, before the evolution of the languages we speak today.
Renfrew was made a member of the House of Lords in Britain in 1991 and so was, without question, just about as distinguished and successful as an archaeologist could be. Nonetheless, in “A Seductive and Troubling Work,” the much younger Ricardo Elia criticized him—and criticized him robustly. In his review, Elia’s argument was drawn from the fact that Renfrew had lent his considerable name to a collection of Cycladic antiquities in which none of the objects had any secure provenance whatsoever. Renfrew, Elia said, had written about the collection as a jewel, as a wonderful aspect of Cycladic art—and yet, archaeologically speaking, it had no meaning. Because these objects had been looted, no one could have any real idea which island they had come from, what age they were, what their function was, what their relationship was to one another, whether they had been painted over in antiquity, and so on. For Elia, the Goulandris Collection barely deserved the name: It was booty rather than a proper collection, which ought to tell us as much as possible about the past. He regretted that a distinguished professor had lent his name and prestige to such an enterprise. “Collectors,” he said, “cause looting by creating a market demand for antiquities. Looting, in turn, causes forgeries, since forgeries can only remain undetected where there is a substantial corpus of antiquities without proper archaeological provenance. These two problems—looting and forgery—fundamentally corrupt the integrity of the field of ancient art history.” Elia ended his review with a phrase that was to cause much controversy, but would stick. “The truth is,” he said, “Collectors are the Real Looters.” Without their money, and their demand, there would be no market.
No one likes being criticized, but Renfrew took Elia’s attack in good humor—and on the chin. He replied in the next issue of Archaeology, and in doing so he substantially accepted Elia’s point. He agreed that in lending his credibility to the Goulandris Collection, he had, however inadvertently and indirectly, added to the risk that more antiquities would be looted, because collectors would believe that they could gain—socially, intellectually, financially—by becoming involved in such affairs. He added: “I was certainly shocked, on visiting the exhibition of the collection of Leon Levy and Shelby White at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a couple of years ago, to find the most extraordinary treasure store of looted antiquities from all over the Ancient World.”
It took Renfrew a while, but having familiarized himself with the problem and having been satisfied that the looting of antiquities had reached unprecedented and unacceptable proportions, he set up the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge, a special unit dedicated to academic study of the problem, to draw attention to the seriousness of the situation and devise methods to combat the crisis.
The Renfrew–Elia debate lasted, roughly speaking, from 1993 to 1997. Neither man could have known, going into this standoff, that the Medici seizure was about to take place and would throw an immense amount of light on the subject. For the truth is that, museums apart, Giacomo Medici supplied most, if not all, of the main collections of classical antiquities that have been formed since World War II. All modern postwar collections—and there are five of them, in the United States and Europe—are stuffed with loot, loot that has been acquired largely through Giacomo Medici and, for the most part, the collectors know it, or knew it if they have since died.
In a very hard sense, when you consider the sums of money involved, Ricardo Elia is right, perhaps more right than he himself knew at the time of his review: Collectors are the real looters.
Besides being president and CEO of the Kennedy Galleries in New York, Lawrence Fleischman was widely known for his philanthropic activities. Born in 1925 in Detroit, he studied at the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois, at Purdue University and the University of Detroit, from which he graduated in 1948, the year he married his wife, Barbara. He first became interested in antiquities during World War II, when he was a soldier stationed in France and visited the Roman ruins at Besançon. In 1963, he purchased several Greek vases from the collection of William Randolph Hearst. In 1966, he and his family moved to New York, where he became a partner in the Kennedy Galleries. His wife and he were supporters of many art institutions, including the Met, the Detroit Institute of Art, the British Museum, and the Vatican. Mr. Fleischman served on a White House advisory committee during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was cofounder with the art historian E. P. Richardson of the Archives of American Art. He founded the Art Journal and was a fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library. With his wife, he formed an important collection of American art and he was asked by Pope Paul VI to help form a collection of modern religious art for the Vatican. In 1978, the Pope named Mr. Fleischman a papal knight of the Order of St. Sylvester, and in 1986, he was named a knight commander of that order by Pope John Paul II. During this period, he met Dietrich von Bothmer, who advised the Fleischmans to sell the antiquities they then had, and according to a catalog written about their subsequent acquisitions, “He introduced them to dealers who specialized in ancient art.”
In 1996, the Getty Museum acquired the Fleischman Collection of classical antiquities. The collection, which numbered some 300 objects, was valued at $80 million. The bulk was donated to the museum, the remainder—about $20 million worth—being purchased. How much the Fleischmans kept back isn’t known.
This acquisition aroused concern among archaeologists for two reasons. First, as various studies have shown, 92 percent of the collection had no provenance, with the remaining 8 percent having been in other recent collections; in other words, they probably had no real provenance either. Second, the Getty Museum itself, in the form of Marion True and a colleague, published the Fleischman Collection, in a catalog for an exhibition in 1994 and then, immediately following its purchase of the collection, announced a new acquisitions policy—that objects would now not be purchased unless they were shown to be in established, published collections. Because the Fleischman Collection was now published (by Marion True, no less), this maneuver enabled the Getty to acquire its 300 objects “legitimately.”
This was disingenuous, if not downright cynical. Being in a “published collection” does not somehow, as if by magic, make illicit objects licit. Such a maneuver may put a name between the museum and the soil of whatever country the antiquities have been looted from, but that is all. Moreover, where records exist and are available, and despite the Fleischmans’ undoubted distinguished background, their antiquities collection was almost entirely made up of loot, and they and the Getty knew it.
Between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995, A Passion for Antiquities: Ancient Art from the Collection of Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman was on exhibit, first at the Getty in Malibu, and then in Cleveland. In the foreword to the catalog, John Walsh, director of the Getty, and Robert P. Bergman, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, had this to say, among other things: “Unlike museum collections that generally try to provide the public with as complete and representative a view of an artistic period or medium as possible, the private collection knows no such restrictions. The only consideration for the collectors are, Do I like it? Can I afford it? Can I live with it? . . . The guiding factor in the selection of these pieces has been their exceptional artistic quality, not their archaeological interest.” These words are as interesting for what is not said as for what is. Surely, being aware of the widespread looting taking place in many countries that are home to ancient civilizations, one question any private collector should ask (as should a museum curator) is this: Is it ethical to acquire the objects I am intending to
buy? These sentiments of Walsh and Bergman (particularly the comment about acquisition for reasons of artistic excellence, not archaeological interest) were reinforced, to an extent, in the body text of the catalog where Lawrence Fleischman was quoted as follows: “When you are collecting for an institution, you are always influenced by what the collection needs; in commerce, you are motivated by what sells; but in forming a personal collection, you know that you will have to live with the object twenty-four hours a day, so you buy only what you react to most positively.” In other words, there was a sense here that the Fleischman Collection was an entity personal to the Fleischmans rather than a collection more suited to a museum.
This is of interest here because the documents that Pellegrini found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva caused Paolo Ferri, the prosecutor, to ask several searching questions of the Getty. In turn, this produced a number of internal Getty documents to be made available. Though these were partially “redacted”—edited, because the Getty said certain parts were not relevant—the picture they reveal is clear enough.
In a note Marion True wrote to John Walsh, dated January 30, 1992, that is, two years before the exhibition of the Fleischman Collection, she wrote:On September 21, 1991, Lawrence Fleischman telephoned to ask if the Museum would be interested in purchasing nine of the major pieces, including one group of 41 individual objects, in his collection.
True said that Fleischman’s reason for selling was “apparently” personal financial difficulties due to the weak market in property and American paintings.