Chasing Aphrodite (42 page)

At the Getty Villa, True's ghost still haunted the galleries, her high-pitched voice echoing through the audio guide, talking about the significance of objects that were no longer there. In the fall of 2007, items began disappearing from the villa overnight, removed from display cases or taken down from walls to await the arrival of a plainclothes Carabinieri, who would escort them back to Italy. Among these items were the griffins sinking their teeth into the hapless doe, the arresting scene that had greeted visitors coming off the second-floor elevator; the large marble basin with traces of the original painting, a centerpiece of the Trojan War room; and the Tyche, a small statue of the goddess of fortune that Medici had once offered to True along with a bribe. An Etruscan roof ornament and vase from the Fleischman collection, mainstays of the Dionysus room and theater gallery, disappeared as well.

Pieces once trumpeted with press kits and public acclaim had been unceremoniously ushered out of the villa after hours, like disgraced family members. Their absence was marked only by small felt stickers, barely concealed holes in the walls, and conspicuously empty spaces.

Meanwhile, the Aphrodite remained on display, seemingly untouched. During negotiations with the Itali ans, the Getty had convened a panel of international experts—including archaeologist Malcolm Bell—to conduct the first thorough study of the iconic statue. A surprising fact began to emerge: the subject likely wasn't the goddess of love after all, but Persephone, the goddess of fertility. The only sign of the monumental struggle over her destiny was a discreet phrase Getty officials added without fanfare to her nameplate: "On loan from Italy."

I
TALY, MEANWHILE, CONTINUED
to wring concessions from other American museums.

In October 2007, Princeton University agreed to send back eight objects. The following month, New York dealer Jerry Eisenberg—who had sold the Getty his entire stock in the mid-1970s to fill the new Malibu museum—also returned eight antiquities, valued at $510,000.

In January 2008, New York socialite Shelby White became the first and most prominent collector to fall, ending eighteen months of intense negotiations with the promise to return ten pieces, including another masterpiece vase by Euphronios that had been on loan to the Met, where White served as a board member. Later that year, she returned two more pieces to Greece. White's objects flew back to Italy on the same plane as the two marble busts that had been found with the Aphrodite's head in Morgantina and purchased by Maurice Tempelsman.

In November 2008, the Cleveland Museum of Art agreed to return fourteen antiquities to Italy, citing proof that they had been looted. The majestic bronze Apollo would be the subject of a joint investigation. Six months later, Hicham and Ali Aboutaam, Lebanese brothers who operated antiquities galleries in Geneva and New York, returned 251 antiquities to Italy. They were among the thousands of pieces the brothers kept in storage in a Geneva warehouse adjacent to that of Giacomo Medici, a former mentor.

The stream of returned objects told a compelling story about the extent of the trade in looted antiquities. Yet for all the contrition on the part of shamed museums, dealers, and collectors, every return was accompanied by the claim that the buyer had purchased the object innocently, with no knowledge of its illicit origins. The truth about the antiquities trade was still being denied.

Most of these pieces joined a triumphant exhibition of prodigal artifacts on display at the Palazzo del Quirinale, the official residence of the president of Italy, located on the highest of Rome's seven hills. More than a million visitors came to see the exhibit, whose title, Nostoi: Returned Masterpieces, was a reference to the heroes of the Trojan War who had returned home after their long ordeal.

Rutelli hinted that it was just the beginning. "I expect that over the next few years, hundreds of other works stolen from our national patrimony and taken abroad will return to Italy," he told the Italian press, adding that hundreds of objects in England from the Robin Symes collection might soon follow. "Ours is not a nationalistic discourse. On the contrary: it is a universal one, because each national patrimony belongs to the world, and circulation cannot be left to illegal organizations."

From Rome, the exhibit traveled to Athens, where it was displayed with the Getty's golden wreath and other returned artifacts. After the exhibit ended, the Italian pieces were sent home for permanent display in the regional museums of Lazio, Campania, Apulia, Umbria, and Sicily—near where they were once wrenched out of underground tombs.

In December 2010, Getty conservators quietly disassembled the Aphrodite and packed it for return to Italy, where it arrived in early 2011. The statue will spend its remaining years alongside other prodigal treasures at a seventeenth-century Capuchin monastery that serves as a museum in Aidone, the town just outside the ruins of Morgantina.

The chase is finally over.

A
S IN A
Greek tragedy, the Getty sowed the seeds of its own disgrace. For years it built an enviable collection of antiquities by turning a blind eye to their origins. Along the way, museum officials came to believe their own rationalizations and ignored the stark prophecies of people such as Arthur Hought on, who in the early 1980s had warned that "curatorial avarice" would someday trigger an international investigation and leave a stain on the Getty's name. When the day of reckoning came more than twenty years later, the Getty responded with hubris, then became mired in indecision. Unable to choose between saving its curator and saving its collection, the Getty wavered—and lost both.

Yet the controversy has had its redemptive effect. The Getty was forced to do something it had long avoided: pull back the veil of lies and obfuscation, go beyond "optical due diligence," and confront the truth about its past. In doing so, the chastened museum helped usher in an era of cultural exchange. The Getty's redemption came at a high cost, however. The museum lost forty of its most prized ancient objects, leaving the collection significantly diminished. But soon after they were returned, a remarkable series of long-term loans began to arrive from Italy.

The first came in the summer of 2009: the Chimera of Arezzo, a striking bronze sculpture of the legendary fire-breathing monster that bears the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. For centuries, the slaying of the Chimera has been an allegory for culture's triumph over human nature, the victory of right over might. Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, the renowned Etruscan masterpiece was accompanied by the detailed story of its discovery, archaeological context, and ownership history—something lost for nearly all the objects in the Getty's permanent collection. The Chimera was found in 1553 by workers in Arezzo, east of Florence. A cache of small bronze figures found with it indicated they had been part of an offering to Tinia, the king of the Etruscan gods. The famed Medici family owned the piece before it was given to the Uffizi Palace in 1718 and the National Archaeological Museum of Florence in 1870. This was the type of coveted information that would never be available for the Aphrodite, the true identity and purpose of which remain a mystery to this day.

The Chimera loan was the first fruit of broad collaboration agreements Italy struck with the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and other institutions that returned a token number of their looted treasures. The arrangements carried enormous benefits for both sides. Museums received crowddrawing masterpieces of unimpeachable provenance. The Italians appeared magnanimous while showing off some of their most precious objects, many of which had been languishing in remote regional museums. Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri retired soon after the Getty deal was struck, but similar deals are likely to emerge as his successors press their case with museums in Europe, Japan, and Australia to which looted objects have been traced.

The agreements also appear to be achieving a much broader goal. Italian authorities have reported a marked decline in looting from archaeological sites. American museums have all but stopped purchasing recently looted Greek and Roman antiquities. Reforms made in the wake of the Getty scandal were consolidated by a changing of the guard in the American museum community. A generation of "grand acquisitors"—Thomas Hoving, Jiri Frel, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Cornelius Vermeule—passed away during the scandal, and the Met's Philippe de Montebello retired. They have been replaced by a younger cadre of more enlightened directors who, like Marion True, may have sinned in the past but eventually embraced reform. A similar evolution has begun in the antiquities market itself. The men who dominated the trade for decades—Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, Robin Symes, Gianfranco Becchina—were consumed by their legal battles, yielding to a younger generation of dealers who wrestled more openly with the ethics of the trade.

Whether these changes will take hold more broadly remains to be seen. Looting continues around the globe, and wealthy collectors in Asia, Russia, and the Middle East have quickly filled the void left by American museums in the antiquities market. Even in America, some museums appear not to have gotten the message. Even as the Getty scandal made international headlines, several other southern California museums were caught in a tax fraud scheme to accept donations of looted Southeast Asian artifacts. The machinations were jarringly similar to the one Frel had carried out at the Getty some two decades earlier.

Likewise, not all archaeologically rich countries have been as reasonable as Italy, which limited its demands to objects looted since the 1970 UNESCO Convention. In April 2010, Egyptian officials organized a conference of twenty-one countries to draw up a wish list of artifacts they wanted returned. Many of the sought-after pieces were taken generations ago under colonial rule or other ethically murky circumstances. Greece, meanwhile, revived its demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum. It was an old argument made fresh by the $200 million museum the Greek government opened at the base of the Acropolis in 2008. Some of these claims carry moral weight, but just as often they are driven by emotion and nationalistic impulses. Ultimately, they do little to address the scourge of modern looting.

As for the Getty, it appears unable to shake its founder's curse. Just as the organization emerged from the dark period of crisis marked by the fall of Barry Munitz and the conflagration over its antiquities collection, unrest returned. In 2009, the greatest recession in modern times forced the Getty to lay off veteran staff and once again curb its ambitions. In January 2010, museum director Michael Brand was pushed out after clashing over money with Getty Trust CEO James Wood—a sign that the Getty's unusual structure remains a nagging source of instability. Wood died unexpectedly in June 2010, leaving the world's richest arts organization for a time with no chief executive, no museum director, and a newly appointed board chairman to chart its uncertain future. It remains an organization still struggling to live up to its vast potential.

Marion True, meanwhile, remained stuck in the purgatory of the Italian judicial system until October 2010, when the statute of limitations expired on her remaining criminal charges. After five years of trial, True was excused without a verdict, leaving unresolved the question of her guilt or innocence. In truth, True's punishment has already been meted out—the destruction of her career and reputation, the unraveling of decades of work, and the return of dozens of objects she risked everything to acquire. True, at once the greatest sinner and the greatest champion of reform, has been made to pay for the crimes of American museums.

Like a heroine in a Greek tragedy, it took True's downfall to achieve the goal that guided much of her career. Her undoing forged a peace between collectors and archaeologists, museums and source countries. The new era she called for at Rutgers in 1998 is now within sight. It is one in which museums and countries alike will look beyond questions of ownership and embrace, as True said, the "sharing of cultural properties, rather than their exploitation as commodities."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

FURTHER READING

INDEX

This book would have been impossible without the help of numerous people.

First among them are our confidential sources, all of whom spoke with us at considerable personal risk because they believed the public had a right to know the truth.

We are grateful to the staff and leadership of the J. Paul Getty Trust, who cooperated with this project knowing it would not always put their institution in a favorable light. In particular, former museum director Michael Brand, Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig, and outside counsel Luis Li gave us ample time to make sure we got it right.

Beyond the Getty, Thomas and Nancy Hoving in New York City opened their home, their archives, and their formidable minds to us. Many of the scandals in this book were first uncovered by this duo some twenty years before we arrived, and their humor, energy, and endless generosity are deeply appreciated. Thomas Hoving remained a supporter until his death in December 2009. In Maryland, Arthur Houghton generously allowed us to spend days in his home reviewing his considerable archives, which proved to be an essential window into the early years at the Getty Museum.

In Italy, we are indebted to Livia Borghese for her translation, friendship, and patience as she sat through hours of legal hearings on our behalf, broken only by Robert Hecht's occasional arias or Giacomo Medici's frothing rants. Her smile opened doors in Rome, guided us through an uneasy quiet in Sicily, and helped us navigate the catacombs of Cerveteri.

In Athens, we were lucky to find not just a dogged fellow investigator but a friend, Nikolas Zirganos. He, too, welcomed us into his home and shared his wisdom from years on the trail of Greece's stolen patrimony.