The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  I called him and told him what he had.

  In November 2006, charges were brought against Marion True, Christoph Leon, the two Greek looters, now named as Georgios Tsatalis and Georgios Kagias, and the Serb middleman, L. J. Kovasevic, for their involvement in the golden wreath case. On December 13, Marion True arrived in Athens to meet with prosecutor Apostolos Zavitsianos. She had been summoned to testify concerning the golden wreath. She asked for a postponement, which she received, and finally testified in January 2007, when she pleaded “not guilty” and submitted a fourteen-page defense. She was released on bail, for $19,500.

  By then, however, the Getty had announced, in December 2006, that it had agreed to hand over the wreath and the marble kore because, as Michael Brand said, “There was a disturbing element regarding provenance . . .” Among this evidence were Polaroids of the wreath found in Gianfranco Becchina’s archive. It seems that Becchina refused to buy the wreath but the Polaroids were a giveaway all the same. Even more important, though, were Seliachas’—the painter’s—photographs.

  Simultaneously, the Greek prosecutor began an inquiry into the illegal trafficking and sale of the kore. After Marion True, Robin Symes is now being investigated by both the Italian and the Greek authorities. In fact, both the wreath and the kore were returned to Greece in March 2007.

  The Papadimitrious were also charged with receiving illegal goods. Despina and her three children, Alexis, Dimitri, and Angeliki all denied the charges, claiming that the seized antiquities belonged to the deceased Christo, and that some of the objects mentioned in the indictment had been bought at Christie’s in New York the previous year, and hadn’t been unwrapped.

  It did not go unnoticed, either by Gligoris and Diotis, by Ferri (who had been given copies), or by Daniela Rizzo that the Symes/Michaelides photographs were professionally made—and displayed antiquities of equal and at times higher quality than is shown in either Medici’s or Becchina’s Polaroid archive. Whereas the main body of the Italians’ inventory was made up of vases, supplemented by sculptures, bronzes, and marbles, the Symes archive—besides being huge—is chiefly comprised of marble sculptures, portrait busts, and bronzes of different kinds. The overall quality is breathtaking.

  Some of these are shown in the photographic section. More than that, however, we can report that Christos Tsirogiannis, the young Greek archaeologist who accompanied Gligoris on the two raids, has now spent several months examining the Symes photographic record—and has made more than 200 matches between objects handled by him and antiquities in the world’s museums and auction houses.

  The Schinoussa photo archive contains 2, 191 photos of 995 artifacts. All photos were shot by professional photographers except for just four Polaroids. On the reverse of the professional photos there are stamps of the studios, which range from Basel, Switzerland to Kingston-upon-Thames and Bond Street in Britain to Madison Avenue in New York.

  Again according to Christos Tsirogiannis, out of the 995 artifacts shown in Symes’ archive, 610 are Greco-Roman, 136 are Egyptian and 249 are from the Far East, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia.

  Symes’ photo archive was also examined by the distinguished Greek archaeologist, Professor Giannis Sakellarakis, who says that the photos from Schinoussa portray “meticulously restored artifacts of great artistic significance that could effectively constitute the contents of an entire museum in their own right.” He adds: “These antiquities are of great artistic achievement and they cover an extensive spectrum of civilizations and chronological periods dating as far back as the third millennium BC up to early Christian times.”

  Tsirogiannis agrees that the person responsible for their selection must have an exceptionally keen eye since only significant artifacts were included, the creme de la creme, and no single item proved of inferior quality.

  This fact is particularly noticeable where Greek pottery is concerned. In order to amass a collection of such outstanding quality, thousands of artifacts must have been inspected. This could only be the result of extensive looting of at least hundreds—if not thousands—of tombs and temples. Many artifacts appear unrestored in some photos, shown in the condition in which they were discovered, still smeared or encrusted with the remains of various sediments deposited during their prolonged stay in the ground or underwater, further clear indication that they derive from illegal excavations.

  Comparing these unrestored antiquities with others that have undergone full restoration, it also becomes evident that the restorers employed by Symes must have been among the best in the field.

  The photo archive from Schinoussa is important not only because it provides the best record of (part of) the most important unprovenanced antiquities handled by Symes but also because it allows us in many cases to match these artifacts with Polaroid pictures taken by the looters and also to match the same objects as they surface in the showcases of museums or important private collections. Here, too, as with Medici, the whole chain—from the ground to the great museums and collections—is gradually being exposed.

  Here are some examples:

  Symes Archive No. 1471, 1475–1483, 1950–1963: A marble statue of the Goddess Artemis, Hellenistic period.

  In the American magazine House and Garden for June 1998, the statue is shown in the living room of a luxury villa belonging to an unnamed couple in Colorado, restored, surrounded by other antiquities—Cycladic idols, Etruscan vases, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures, and an art deco Eileen Gray lacquered chair. This same statue, of Artemis, matches one from the Medici photos, found in the Geneva Freeport. The statue has dirt on it and is not restored. Five other artifacts shown in the living room of the unnamed collector are also shown in Symes’ files from Schinoussa.

  This Artemis is, in fact, the same as the one whose photograph was found in the glove compartment of Pasquale Camera’s overturned Renault the day he was killed near Monte Cassino. It is the same Artemis as the one Frida Tchacos eventually returned, having tried to mislead Ferri by first returning a fake version (see above, pp. 13–14 and 189–190). Apparently, Frida Tchacos sold the Artemis to an Italian middleman in Japan before the Colorado couple acquired it. Now it is exhibited in a museum in Rome.

  Symes Archive No. 243: A black-figure amphora, Attic workshop by the “Swing painter,” dated to ca. 540–530 BC. Side A shows Dionysus flanked by two satyrs in dancing postures. On side B, the divine couple Athena and Hermes are conversing, watched by a mortal.

  This vase, described as “exceptional” by Tsirogiannis, is shown in the Medici archives, depicted in five Polaroids, where the vase appears partially restored, with holes and joins visible, encrusted with dirt, and is placed on a wooden box. The same vase, fully restored, appears in the Goulandris Cycladic Art Museum in Athens (col. No. 716), with no provenance.

  Symes Archive No. 715: Three stone vases.

  According to Professor Sakellarakis, two of these three antiquities are typical Minoan stone vases very similar to others that were found in Messara region of Crete. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Messara region was heavily looted by Greek tomb robbers.

  Symes Archive No. 701–709: A Roman bronze head of a young man.

  These black and white photographs comprise two of the four Polaroids in the Symes archive. On the back of the photos is written: “Photograph of head before clearing [or ‘cleaning’?] via R. Symes.”

  Elsewhere in the archive, there are five photographs (not Polaroids) of the same object after restoration. Beside one photo there is a typed note: “The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, No. L.72.79.5. Lent by the Getty (head b.)”

  Symes Archive No. 2205–6: A marble sculpture, Youth with jumping weights.

  These are also Polaroid pictures. The statue is shown in the process of restoration. The same artifact is in Symes archives No. 1996–2000, semirestored, and can also be found on the Cleveland Museum of Art website, restored, with the indication: “Italy, Rome, mid 1st century, No. 1985.79.” No provenance is given. The website underlines that the item
is not on display.

  Symes Archive No. 1768: A marble head.

  This object is also shown in the Medici archive, in two Polaroid photographs. The same object was sold in a Sotheby’s auction, in New York, sales catalogue, 12 June 2003, page 32–33, No. 30.

  Symes Archive No. 1767: Marble statue of Zeus enthroned.

  In Symes’ photographs it is shown before restoration, apparently as it came out of the sea. The same object appears in the Getty museum, No. 92.AA.10. It is described as “Greek, about 100 BC., marble.” No provenance is given but the museum’s website entry reads: “This statuette may have served as a cult statue in a private shrine of a wealthy Greek or Roman home. As the marine incrustations indicate, this statuette spent a long period of time submerged in the sea. The unmarred left side of the sculpture was probably buried in the sand and was thus protected.”

  All this activity, from “Operation Eclipse” forward, marks a new era in Greece. Following the successes of the Italians in recovering so much material by targeting the middlemen, the collectors, and the museums—rather than the tomb robbers themselves—the Greeks are now employing a similar strategy. And, because of the proven depredations of the museums in Baghdad and Kabul, following the armed conflicts, there is a new attitude among many Greeks—as among many other nations—toward their own heritage and the damage the illicit market is inflicting.

  22

  CONCLUSION: $500 MILLION + 100,000 LOOTED TOMBS = CHIPPINDALE’S LAW

  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 ex
hibition, 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.