Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Chasing Aphrodite

  The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum

  Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I

  1. THE LOST BRONZE

  2. A PERFECT SCHEME

  3. TOO MORAL

  4. WORTH THE PRICE

  5. AN AWKWARD DEBUT

  6. THE WINDBLOWN GODDESS

  7. THE CULT OF PERSEPHONE

  PART II

  8. THE APTLY NAMED DR. TRUE

  9. THE FLEISCHMAN COLLECTION

  10. A HOME IN THE GREEK ISLANDS

  11. CONFORTI'S MEN

  12. THE GETTY'S LATEST TREASURE

  13. FOLLOW THE POLAROIDS

  14. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

  PART III

  15. TROUBLESOME DOCUMENTS

  16. MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS

  17. ROGUE MUSEUMS

  18. THE REIGN OF MUNITZ

  19. THE APRIL FOOLS' DAY INDICTMENT

  20. LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS

  21. TRUE BELIEVERS

  22. A BRIGHT LINE

  Epilogue: Beyond Ownership

  ...

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Felch, Jason.

  Chasing Aphrodite: the hunt for looted antiquities at the world's

  richest museum / Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-15-101501-6

  1. Classical antiquities—Destruction and pillage. 2. Cultural property—

  Repatriation—Italy. 3. Cultural property—Repatriation—California—Malibu.

  4. J. Paul Getty Museum—Corrupt practices. I. Frammolino, Ralph. II. Title.

  CC135.F46 2011

  930—dc22 2010025835

  Book design by Victoria Hartman

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Photo credits appear on [>].

  For Nico

  —J.F.

  For Allyson and Anna

  —R.F.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE [>]

  Part I • Windfalls and Cover-ups

  1. THE LOST BRONZE [>]

  2. A PERFECT SCHEME [>]

  3. TOO MORAL [>]

  4. WORTH THE PRICE [>]

  5. AN AWKWARD DEBUT [>]

  6. THE WINDBLOWN GODDESS [>]

  7. THE CULT OF PERSEPHONE [>]

  Part II • The Temptation of Marion True

  8. THE APTLY NAMED DR. TRUE [>]

  9. THE FLEISCHMAN COLLECTION [>]

  10. A HOME IN THE GREEK ISLANDS [>]

  11. CONFORTI'S MEN [>]

  12. THE GETTY'S LATEST TREASURE [>]

  13. FOLLOW THE POLAROIDS [>]

  14. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING [>]

  Part III • "After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?"

  15. TROUBLESOME DOCUMENTS [>]

  16. MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS [>]

  17. ROGUE MUSEUMS [>]

  18. THE REIGN OF MUNITZ [>]

  19. THE APRIL FOOLS' DAY INDICTMENT [>]

  20. LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND FAMOUS [>]

  21. TRUE BELIEVERS [>]

  22. A BRIGHT LINE [>]

  EPILOGUE: BEYOND OWNERSHIP [>]

  Acknowledgments [>]

  Notes [>]

  Further Reading [>]

  Index [>]

  Prologue

  IN RECENT YEARS, several of America's leading art museums have given up some of their finest pieces of classical art, handing over more than one hundred Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities to the governments of Italy and Greece. The monetary value of the returned objects has been estimated at more than half a billion dollars. The aesthetic loss to the nation's art collections is immeasurable. Several of the objects have long been hailed as the defining masterpieces of their era. Yet for the most part, the museums gave up these ancient sculptures, vases, and frescoes under no legal obligation and with no promise of compensation. After decades of painstaking collecting, why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity?

  The returns followed an international scandal that exposed an ugly truth, something art insiders had long known but publicly denied. For decades, museums in America, Europe, and elsewhere had been buying recently looted objects from a criminal underworld of smugglers and fences, in violation of U.S. and foreign law.

  The museum world's dirty little secret came to light amid revelations about pedophile priests in the Catholic Church and widespread steroid use in major league baseball. Like those scandals, the truth about museums and looting—documented in blurry Polaroids and splashed across newspapers around the world—redefined some of America's most cherished institutions in the public mind. Museums have long been our civic temples, places to worship beauty and the diversity of the world's cultures. Now they are also recognized as multimillion-dollar showcases for stolen property.

  The crime in question, trafficking in looted art, is hardly new. Indeed, it is probably the world's second-oldest profession. One of the earliest known legal documents is an Egyptian papyrus dating to 1100 B.C. that chronicles the trial of several men caught robbing the tombs of pharaohs. (The document resides not in Egypt, of course, but in London, after being "acquired" by the British Museum in the 1880s.) The Romans sacked Greece; Spain plundered the New World; Napoleon filled the Louvre with booty taken from across his empire. In the eighteenth century, caravans of British aristocrats on the grand tour blithely plucked what they wanted from ancient sites, sending home wagonloads of ancient art for their country estates.

  This long parade of plunder has occasionally been interrupted by outcry and debate. In 70 B.C., a sharp-tongued Roman attorney named Cicero summoned all his oratorical skills to press a criminal case against the corrupt governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, whose wholesale sacking of temples, private homes, and public monuments bordered on kleptomania.

  "In all Sicily, in all that wealthy and ancient province ... there was no silver vessel, no Corinthian or Delian plate, no jewel or pearl, nothing made of gold or ivory, no statue of marble or brass or ivory, no picture whether painted or embroidered, that he did not seek out, that he did not inspect, that, if he liked it, he did not take away," Cicero told the Roman Senate. Looting was "what Verres calls his passion; what his friends call his disease, his madness; what the Sicilians call his rapine."

  In 1816, more than eighteen hundred years later, a similar condemnation echoed throughout the halls of the British Parliament after Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, returned from Greece with shiploads of exquisitely carved friezes ripped from the Parthenon. The marbles represented the artistic zenith of ancient Greece and had survived for twenty-two centuries. Their removal represented the nadir of antiquities collecting. Even Britain's wealthy cognoscenti, men who had feasted on marble trophies from Greece and Rome for more than a century, recoiled at the magnitude of Lord Elgin's appetite. The most stinging rebuke flowed from the quill of Lord Byron, Elgin's contemporary and a gre
at defender of Greek culture. In his poem "The Curse of Minerva," Byron gives voice to the goddess herself to denounce the intrepid collector:

  I saw successive Tyrannies expire;

  'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,

  Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.

  Britain eventually bought the marbles from Elgin and installed them in the British Museum, the first of the so-called encyclopedic museums. It was soon joined by the Louvre, the National Museums in Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these repositories of human achievement accumulated some of the world's most celebrated works of art, many of which might otherwise have been lost. The museums pioneered new ways to protect and conserve them and spent millions building palatial galleries in which to display them. They saw themselves as products of the Enlightenment, brick-and-mortar extensions of Diderot'sEncyclopédie.But they were also the products of colonialism, driven to collect by a sense of cultural superiority that justified the unchecked acquisition of relics from the far reaches of their empires.

  In America, this attitude prevailed well into the post—World War II boom years, when prosperity gave rise to a new class of regional museums and nouveau riche art enthusiasts who adopted the role of the enlightened collector. Many sought to make their mark in the niche of classical antiquities, which conveyed instant prestige and seemed to yield a never-ending supply of new masterpieces.

  The sudden demand for antiquities fueled looting as never before, not just in Mediterranean countries but also across Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. What had long been a small market in trinkets for tourists rapidly became a sophisticated global supply chain. Illegal excavations destroyed archaeological sites—and the historical record they contained—at a staggering pace.

  The destruction coincided with the changing Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Archaeologically rich countries found a new appreciation for their antiquities, which offered a connection to a glorious past. These so-called source countries began dusting off long-forgotten laws that asserted state ownership of their cultural patrimony, including any undiscovered archaeological finds within their modern borders. The efforts came in fits and starts and were easily dismissed by collectors and museums. But they found a sympathetic following among archaeologists, who saw firsthand the ravages of looting. Scholars began to trace the paths of looted objects from plundered grave sites to the shelves of local museums.

  The crisis culminated in 1970 with a landmark international treaty for the protection of cultural property brokered by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. The UNESCO Convention sought to stop the illicit flow of artifacts by weaving together a loose patchwork of national patrimony laws into a seamless net. The United States and more than one hundred other countries eventually signed the accord, agreeing to restrict the importation of illicit objects. In doing so, they recognized that an antiquity's value lay not just in its intrinsic beauty but also in its archaeological context—where it was found and how it related to those surroundings.

  The treaty was hailed as a paradigm shift. The great collecting museums in America and Europe publicly supported it, with Thomas Hoving, then director of the mighty Met, declaring, "The Age of Piracy is over."

  But in truth, UNESCO changed very little. For the past forty years, museum officials have routinely violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the UNESCO treaty and foreign and domestic laws, buying ancient art they knew had been illegally excavated and spirited out of source countries.

  Their actions amounted to a massive betrayal of museums' public mission. To educate the public and preserve the past, white-gloved curators did business with the most corrupt corners of the art world, cutting deals in Swiss bank vaults and smugglers' warehouses with the criminal underclass that controlled the market. They bought objects laundered through auction houses and private collections, accepting—and at times inventing—fake ownership histories that covered criminal origins with falsehoods that to this day obscure the historical record. In doing so, museums have fueled the destruction of far more knowledge than they have preserved, all while ostensibly deploring the havoc that looting wreaks on archaeological sites, our primary source of knowledge about our origins.

  For the Age of Piracy to truly end, it took an international scandal of remarkable proportions. At the center of that scandal was the upstart J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. No institution struggled with the morality of buying looted antiquities more deeply than the Getty. And in the end, none paid a higher price.

  Over four decades, the Getty chased many illicit masterpieces—a bronze athlete, a towering marble youth, a sculpture of savage griffins, a golden funerary wreath. One of those acquisitions—the museum's iconic seven-and-a-half-foot statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love—would become a totem for the beguiling beauty of ancient art.

  The goddess held an allure so strong that a museum risked everything to own her; a nation rose up to demand her return; archaeologists, private investigators, and journalists scoured the globe for her origins; and a curator ruined herself trying to keep her.

  This book is the story of that chase, an unprecedented inside account of how the world's richest museum was forced to confront its buried past and, in doing so, brought about an epochal change in the history of collecting art.

  PART I

  WINDFALLS AND COVER-UPS

  1. THE LOST BRONZE

  IN THE PREDAWN LIGHT of a summer morning in 1964, the sixty-foot fishing trawler Ferrucio Ferri shoved off from the Italian seaport of Fano and motored south, making a steady eight knots along Italy's east coast. When the Ferri reached the peninsula of Ancona, Romeo Pirani, the boat's captain, set a course east-southeast, halfway between the dry sirocco wind that blew up from Africa and the cooler levanter that swept across the Adriatic from Yugoslavia.

  The six-man crew dozed. The sea was glassy, but Pirani knew how temperamental the Adriatic could be at this time of year. Just a few weeks earlier, a sudden storm had blown across the sea, sinking three boats and killing four fishermen. Weather was not his only worry. The Second World War had left its mark on the sea and made his job all the more dangerous. Nets hauled up mines and bombs left behind decades before by retreating Nazi forces or their American pursuers. The arms of many men in Fano bore scars from the acid that oozed out of the rusting ordnance.

  As the sun rose, blinding their eyes, Pirani and his crew sipped moretta, a hot mixture of rum, brandy, espresso, and anise, topped with a lemon rind and lots of sugar. The strong brew gave the men not just warmth but courage. By nightfall, the Ferri had reached its destination, a spot in international waters roughly midway between Italy and Yugoslavia. The captain knew of a rocky outcropping that rose from the seabed where octopuses and schools of merluza and St. Peter's fish gathered for safety in the summer heat. Other boats ventured farther east, into the deep waters off the Yugoslav coast, where they risked arrest for poaching. But Pirani preferred this hidden shoal. Although fishing there meant occasionally snagging the nets on sharp rocks, the boat often returned to port full.

  The crew cast its nets into the dark waters. They fished all night, sleeping in shifts.

  Just after dawn, the nets got caught on something. Pirani gunned the engine and, with a jolt, the nets came free. As some of the men peered over the side, the crew hauled in its catch: a barnacle-encrusted object that resembled a man.

  "Cest un morto!" cried one of the fishermen. A dead man!

  As the sea gave up its secret, it quickly became apparent that the thing was too rigid and heavy to be a man. The crew dragged it to the bow of the boat. The life-size figure weighed about three hundred pounds, had black holes for eyes, and was frozen in a curious pose. Its right hand was raised to its head. Given the thickness of its encrustations, it looked as if it had been resting on the sea floor for centuries.

  The men went about the immediate work of mending the torn nets. It
was only later, when they stopped for a breakfast of roasted fish, that one of them grabbed a gaffe and pried off a patch of barnacles.

  He let out a yelp. "Cest de oro!" he cried, pointing at the flash of brilliant yellow. Gold!

  Pirani pushed through the huddle and looked at the exposed metal. Not gold, he declared, bronze. None of them had ever seen anything like it. It might be worth something. The Ferris men made a hasty decision. Rather than turn the figure over to local authorities, they would sell it and divvy up the profits.

  As the Ferri motored back to Fano that afternoon, word came over the radio that the town was afire with news of the discovery. The spark had come earlier, when the captain had mentioned it while chatting ship to shore with his wife. Crowds had gathered in the port for the Ferris return. Pirani cut the engine and waited until nightfall. By the time the Ferri pulled into port, it was nearly 3 A.M. and the docks were deserted.

  The crew brought the statue ashore on a handcart, hidden under a pile of nets, and took it to the house of Pirani's cousin, who owned the boat. After a few days, the statue began to smell of rotting fish. The cousin moved it to a covered garden patio and quietly invited several local antique dealers to have a look. They offered up to one million lire, but the crew wanted more.

  With the statue's stench growing stronger by the day, the cousin fretted that someone would alert the police. He asked a friend with a Fiat 600 Mutipla to pick up the bronze statue and take it to a farm outside town, where they kept it buried in a cabbage field while they looked for a serious buyer.

  A month later, they found Giacomo Barbetti, an antiquarian whose wealthy family owned a cement factory in Gubbio, fifty miles inland from Fano. Barbetti said that he was prepared to pay several million lire for the statue but naturally needed to see it first. When the figure emerged from the cabbage patch, Barbetti brushed aside the dirt, touched its straight nose, and surmised it to be the work of Lysippus, one of the master sculptors of ancient Greece.

  Lysippus was the personal sculptor of Alexander the Great, and his fame as a sculptor spread throughout the ancient world on the heels of his patron's conquests. Lysippus rewrote the canon for Greek sculpture with figures that were more slender and symmetrical than those of his predecessors Polyclitus and the great Phidias, sculptor of the Acropolis friezes. Aside from busts of Alexander, Lysippus was famous for depicting athletes, and many of his bronzes lined the pathways of Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games. Lysippus is said to have created more than fifteen hundred sculptures in his lifetime, but none was believed to have survived antiquity.