Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Italy's Culture Ministry is housed in the old Collegio Romano, a sixteenth-century university where the Jesuit order was founded. Brand, Li, and the rest of the Getty team were ushered into the ministry's conference room—a large, two-story, dark-wood-paneled library with fluted wooden columns and a long, highly polished conference table in the middle. Waiting for the visitors was an array of Italian officials, many of whom had long memories of the Getty's missteps. Leading the group was Maurizio Fiorilli, a bespectacled senior government attorney with small blue eyes and the frazzled air of a mad genius. Even among the more demonstrative Italians, Fiorilli was known for launching into rambling, circuitous speeches and Chaplinesque pratfalls. But for all the snickering behind his back, Fiorilli commanded respect for his tireless defense of Italian cultural property.

  True to his character, Fiorilli began the meeting with a long discourse on the criminal case, hinting at new indictments and expressing contempt for the Getty's fallen curator. "Marion True! The character of this woman!" he scoffed. Brand brushed aside the prosecutorial thrust, assuring his hosts that the Getty took Italy's patrimony claims seriously—seriously enough for him to miss the opening of the villa to attend this meeting. A cultural official then delivered a stone-faced soliloquy that portrayed the Getty as a rogue institution that had gorged on the fruits of looting ancient sites. The head of the Carabinieri art squad was deferential but made it clear that Italy still wanted the Getty Bronze.

  Li pushed back gently, saying that his law firm had been hired to conduct an independent investigation of the patrimony claims. He was in Rome to get evidence from the Italians to further that investigation. After a break for lunch at La Fortuna, a favorite haunt of politicians and businessmen across from the Pantheon, the session ended with no new information exchanged. Brand and Li were then delivered to the culture minister himself, Buttiglione. A conservative Catholic whose campaign for European Union commissioner had been derailed by his opposition to abortion, Buttiglione was soft-spoken but equally self-righteous about the objects in question. As he puffed on a cigar, he sprinkled his comments with words such as "looted," "illegal," and "stolen," which set the jaws of the Getty's attorneys.

  The Italians left their visitors to twist over the weekend before delivering any particulars. By then, Brand had departed, leaving Li in charge. On Monday, January 30, the Italians presented a three-hour, often chaotic slide show in a marble lecture hall, going over their evidence on each of the contested objects, which now numbered fifty-two. As the slide show continued into the next day, the Getty's lawyers saw scores of Polaroids seized from Giacomo Medici's warehouse. The images were clearly significant, some downright devastating. One showed the Getty's Apollo, now occupying the portico of the villa's basilica room, lying broken on a wooden packing crate, apparently fresh out of the ground. Getty vases were shown standing on someone's rug or kitchen table, or propped up against flocked wallpaper, presumably in a looter's house. For the first time, Getty representatives saw the Etruscan roof ornament that graced the cover of the Fleischman collection catalogue—broken, dirty, standing on a discarded pipe in some refuse yard, against the background of a broken chainlink fence. The worst pictures were of the griffins, lying dirty and broken on a crumpled Italian newspaper in the trunk of a car.

  Besides the visceral impact of the photos, Li immediately recognized their legal import. He was impressed with archaeologist Daniela Rizzo, who made her presentation in measured, academic tones. "See that hole there?" she said, stopping at one slide of a piece of pottery now on display at the Getty Villa. "That was likely caused by a spillo," one of the iron rods looters used to probe for ancient tombs.

  Li convinced the Italians to give him a CD containing their dossier on the objects, his major objective for the trip. But the Italians weren't done. As the second day wound down, Giuseppe Proietti, of the Culture Ministry, insisted on issuing a joint press release saying that the ministry had presented "overwhelming evidence" that the Getty pieces were looted and that the museum was contrite.

  "Signore Proietti, we're building a relationship here," Li pleaded.

  "No," Proietti snapped, "we have to reach an agreement."

  "Even in Italy you don't get married on the first date," Li replied.

  Everyone laughed. They agreed to release a noncommittal statement calling the discussions "frank and productive."

  It was going to be a rocky romance.

  AWEEK LATER, the board of trustees gathered at the Getty Center over the weekend to hear MTO's report on Munitz. The report went into painstaking detail about Munitz's personal use of Getty funds. Even many of his allies on the board had been angered by his recent behavior, including his promise to give Jill Murphy a generous severance package without having secured the board's prior approval. By 9 P.M. Sunday, it was clear that those who wanted Munitz gone had the votes. The board felt that it had uncovered enough evidence against Munitz that he could be convinced to forgo the generous severance deal he'd lobbied for over the past eight years. The trustees voted to give Munitz until Thursday to decide his own fate: quit or be fired.

  In the end, the ax fell before that deadline arrived. As he had with True, Biggs felt it was his duty to deliver the message in person. This time, the board chair summoned the CEO to his room in a modest hotel near the Getty Center. The Getty had started booking trustees there as a public relations precaution since the Munitz spending scandal had hit.

  Waiting with Biggs was fellow trustee Jay Wintrob, CEO of AIG Retirement Services and one of Munitz's most ardent supporters. Wintrob had stood by Munitz as the Los Angeles Times stories had pounded away, but he had changed his mind about the CEO after reading the MTO report. When Munitz showed up, the three sat in Biggs's hotel room as the chairman went over MTO's findings.

  "Barry, the board has voted unanimously to get your resignation," Biggs said at the end.

  Munitz was visibly upset. Wintrob nudged him and said, "Barry, the report was such that they didn't feel they had any choice."

  Finally, Munitz agreed to resign. The conversation wasn't long. Munitz knew it was fruitless to hang on any longer. After the meeting, he and his attorneys negotiated the terms of his departure from the Getty, promising to return $250,000 for any inappropriate expenses and waiving more than $2 million in severance pay guaranteed by his contract. In exchange, the Getty would not hold him responsible for any legal liability the trust faced in the California attorney general's investigation.

  THE GETTY WAS not the only American museum making the pilgrimage to Rome. Met director Philippe de Montebello had long warned the Getty against capitulating to the "nationalistic" demands of Italy. But now, quietly, de Montebello had begun mounting his own rear-guard action to protect his museum from a similar fate.

  Everything had begun to take its toll on de Montebello—shifting public opinion; the increasingly stern legal advice from the Met's general counsel; Ferri's growing interest in the museum and its former antiquities curator Dietrich von Bothmer. The final straw came from the Los Angeles Times, which in the fall of 2005 broke the news that the Italians had found confirmation of the illicit origins of the museum's famed Euphronios krater: Robert Hecht's handwritten memoir. It contained an account of how he had purchased the vase not from a Lebanese collector—the Met's thirty-year cover story—but from Giacomo Medici, whom Hecht described as having close ties to looters. Ferri was now threatening to do to the Met what he had already done to the Getty.

  The Met had a strong self-interest in maintaining good relations with Italy, whose loans often helped the museum mount headline-grabbing blockbuster exhibitions. Indeed, in December 2005 the Met was preparing for an exhibit on Antonello da Messina, Sicily's renowned Renaissance painter. It was possible only because of the cooperation of Sicilian cultural officials and the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, a New York—based nonprofit whose board members included Rocco Buttiglione. As preparations for the exhibit were being finalized, de Montebello sent a letter to Buttiglio
ne requesting a meeting to discuss Italy's claims to the Euphronios krater and Morgantina silvers.

  De Montebello had long demanded "incontrovertible evidence" of the claims. But after his general counsel pointed out that such a standard didn't even apply in capital murder cases, he sheepishly retreated from that demand. After the Italians presented their evidence regarding the krater, the silvers, and four other vases, de Montebello told Proietti, "I think we've got a deal." In return, he pressed the Italians to make long-term loans to the Met of antiquities of similar value and significance to the ones they would lose. The two sides were hammering out the agreement in January 2006, just as Brand and Li were beginning to engage the officials in Rome.

  The Met agreement grabbed international headlines. It was hailed as a watershed event that offered a model resolution for the growing tensions between Italy and American museums. Only de Montebello could have returned such precious objects to Italy and not been denounced by his peers. There was no small irony in the fact that the hardest of hardliners in the American museum community was now being hailed as a hero, while Marion True—who a decade earlier had been scorned for proposing this very approach—was facing a criminal trial.

  Despite the public praise, de Montebello privately regarded the deal as a betrayal of his curators and a black mark on his reputation. He flew back to the United States, where he put the finishing touches on the agreement via conference call while attending the Association of Art Museum Directors' midwinter meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida. After hanging up the phone, he went to eat alone at the Marriott. When an East Coast museum director came over to say hello, a gloomy de Montebello told him about the deal. "I know you're from a different generation," the Met boss said, "but I feel like I've let down my curators."

  "Philippe, you've done a good thing for us," the other director said. "We needed to lance this boil."

  When de Montebello walked into a conference room the next day, he received a standing ovation from his fellow museum directors. They cheered again after he outlined the agreement and explained his reasons for making it.

  On February 21, de Montebello flew back to Rome, where he hoped to sign the deal with Itali an authorities and then quietly slip out of town. Before he could leave, however, the Italians had arranged for a photo opportunity to record the moment for posterity. The Met acknowledged the agreement with a perfunctory one-page press release. In a New York Times interview, de Montebello was unrepentant, saying that he had been forced to make the deal in order to rid the Met of "irritants" and "vexing issues." He accused the Itali ans of "shabby" conduct for leaking the evidence about the Euphronios krater to the press, conveniently glossing over how the Met had ignored Italy's more subtle requests for years. He expressed revulsion at the plunder of cultural monuments while at the same time crediting the black market for preserving many of the world's greatest art objects.

  In a speech before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., two months later, de Montebello was even more strident. He heaped scorn on a few archaeological extremists who, he said, seemed to have captivated the media. He blamed the influx of looted antiquities in America on conniving dealers, while maintaining that museum curators—many of them with Ph.D.'s and archaeological experience themselves—had simply been duped. "Most staff at museums around the world acquiring works with doubtful provenance displayed not cupidity, if you will, but rather guilelessness in the face of very clever imposture and deception."

  He also attacked those who were advocating the adoption of policies forbidding museums to buy antiquities that had appeared on the market without provenance after 1970. "That is not the high moral ground. That is a capitulation to a political agenda and a betrayal of a museum's basic mission and purpose, in this case the rescue and the preservation of objects of great aesthetic merit and intrinsic cultural significance," he said. "To simply and deliberately condemn innumerable worthy objects ... to the trash heap or oblivion, through redirecting the market to a true black market, to buyers less committed to openness, conservation, scholarship and certainly access—is wrong."

  BACK IN LOS ANGELES, Li's antiquities team continued poring over the Italians' photographic evidence, which appeared to support their demands for the return of twenty-one objects, including the griffins and the Apollo. (Li's team eventually found a twenty-second item that the Italians had missed.) The rest of the items on their list were "wobblers" or, as in the case of the Getty Bronze, not supported by the evidence.

  Then there was the Aphrodite. The allegations in the Italians' dossier went back to Silvio Raffiotta's initial investigation and the rumors of a large statue having been found in Morgantina in 1979. There was also the more recent limestone test, which pointed to central Sicily as the source of the stone. The evidence amounted to a compelling circumstantial case, but not airtight proof of Italy's claim.

  Digging through the Getty's files on the statue, Li's team found more pieces to the puzzle: the angry exchange of letters between senior Getty officials Luis Monreal and John Walsh; Renzo Canavesi's 1996 letter offering fragments and new information about the statue to the Getty, as well as True's ambivalent response. When Li contacted Malcolm Bell, the archaeologist reiterated his skepticism about the Morgantina provenance, but he acknowledged that the statue likely came from a place nearby, a conclusion that other scholars shared.

  Canavesi was the one person who could answer the Getty's questions about the statue, yet no one at the Getty had ever questioned him. MTO hired the corporate investigative agency Kroll, which in turn hired a Swiss private detective to conduct a background check on Canavesi. Canavesi's paternal relatives had never been wealthy enough to afford such an important antiquity, the detective found, and although his mother's family had been rich, the fortune had vanished by the time Renzo was born. Could his father, a poor watchmaker, and his mother, a homemaker, really have bought a larger-than-life statue on the eve of World War II? It was highly unlikely, the detective concluded.

  In April 2006, Canavesi agreed to tell his story to the investigators at his attorney's office in Lugano. After serving in the Swiss army during World War II, he said, he had been a policeman for ten years. He quit to start his own currency exchange, which later grew into a shopping mall.

  He admitted to one brush with the law—being stopped by police when his friend, reputed antiquities smuggler Orazio di Simone, was in the car with him. Di Simone was the Sicilian who Italian authorities had repeatedly been told had smuggled the Aphrodite out of Italy. MTO considered contacting di Simone but decided against it after they were warned by Italian law enforcement sources that he had ties to organized crime.

  As for the Aphrodite, Canavesi said that his father had bought the statue in the 1930s in Paris, where he was working in a watch factory. When his family returned to the Lugano region, his father kept the statue unassembled in his home. Canavesi did the same after his father gave him the statue in 1960, keeping it hidden away in boxes in the storage area of his shopping mall. Neither his brother nor his employees knew about it. He didn't think about selling it until 1986, when he met Christo Michaelides, Robin Symes's partner, at a Geneva coin auction. Canavesi said that he went home, pulled the statue out of its boxes, and assembled it with the help of a friend. Michaelides brought Symes to see the statue, and the dealers offered to buy it for $400,000, a transaction recorded on the hand-printed receipt from his money exchange that the Italians had in their dossier.

  The whole story sounded absurd. If Canavesi's father had purchased the statue in Paris, how had he hauled it back to Switzerland and kept it in his family home without anyone else in the family knowing? And why would Canavesi, a self-professed lover of ancient art, keep such a magnificent antiquity packed away in a shopping mall basement?

  As the investigators were about to leave, Canavesi said that there was one more thing. He pulled out some twenty photos and laid them out for the investigators to see. They had been taken in the early 1980s and showed the statue on the floor in frag
ments, surrounded by dirt.

  The photos undermined Canavesi's already implausible story. They might as well have come from Medici's warehouse. Their visceral power came through even in the dry language the Kroll investigators used to describe them. Now, nearly ten years after Marion True had passed up the opportunity to see the photos, the Getty had prima facie evidence that the Aphrodite had been looted.

  After receiving the report of Li's investigation, Brand was convinced that the statue would have to be returned. But he realized that doing so would be a delicate matter. Not only would the Getty trustees be reluctant to part with such a huge asset, but the Getty also had an immense emotional attachment to the Aphrodite. Like a grief counselor, Brand slowly started to prepare people at the Getty to accept the idea that they might have to let her go.

  The process began at a mid-May 2006 board meeting where Li laid out the initial findings of the MTO investigation. The report filled several black binders and weighed more than twenty-five pounds. Touching on the Aphrodite, Li mentioned probl ems with Canavesi's provenance story, discussed his photos, and suggested that "dangerous people" had been involved. Brand tried to get a sense of board members' feelings about a general strategy for negotiating with Italy. What would be the board's conditions for returning the Aphrodite? What information did trustees need to make them feel comfortable with the possibility of giving it back?

  Brand's probing hit a nerve. Two trustees pushed back, saying that they wanted the staff to look into the matter further before even talking about such a drastic step. Although the investigation had punched holes in Canavesi's story, Brand still couldn't tell them with any certainty where the statue had come from.