The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  In speaking about the vase, its English provenance was not all that von Bothmer revealed. He also confirmed that he had first seen it in the garden of Fritz Bürki, a restorer who was listed in the Zurich directory as a sitzmoberschreiner , or chair mender. The vase had been broken, von Bothmer said, but had been reassembled and was complete, save for a few slivers. Von Bothmer further volunteered that, at the Met, if they were offered an object without a pedigree, or provenance, their normal policy was to submit a photograph of the object to the authorities in those countries “that might consider the object part of their cultural or artistic patrimony.” That procedure hadn’t been followed with the Euphronios vase, however, because—it now turned out—Hecht had provided a pedigree. He said that the krater had belonged to an Armenian dealer named Dikran A. Sarrafian, who lived in Beirut, Lebanon. Hecht had provided two letters from Sarrafian, one dated July 10, 1971—that is, a few months before the alleged clandestine dig in Etruria. The first letter said, in part, “In view of the worsening situation in the M.E. [Middle East], I have decided to settle in Australia, probably in N.S.W. [New South Wales]. I have been selling off what I have and have decided to sell also my red figured crater which I have had so long and which you have seen with my friends in Switzerland.” It mentioned a price of “one million dollars and over if possible” and a commission of 10 percent for Hecht. The second letter, dated September 1972, confirmed that Sarrafian’s father had acquired the vase in 1920 in London, in exchange for some Greek and Roman gold and silver coins.

  On learning all this, the enterprising Gage dashed to Beirut, traced Sarrafian, who—over several whiskies at the St. George Hotel—told him that Hecht had just been and gone. Sarrafian, according to Gage, was a smalltime dealer in coins, who also organized archaeological tourism. He would not at first say what, exactly, Hecht had paid him for the vase, or why the American had flown to see him in such a hurry. He admitted to Gage that he did not collect—either vases or statues—but had inherited “a hatbox full of pieces.” This is the man that the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, would not identify to begin with because he owned other “major objects” that the museum might want.

  This whole set of events—so improbable, so inconsistent and mysterious—had created a furor in Italy, as had the fact that so far as the fractures in the vase were concerned, none of them crossed any of the ten faces on the figures. This was miraculous good fortune. Unless, perhaps, the vase had been deliberately and carefully broken in order to smuggle it more easily out of the country where it had been found.

  Gage didn’t give up. Back in Rome, and acting on a tip, he drove to Cerveteri, the ancient site of an Etrurian city northwest of Rome, and went from door to door asking for a man known as il Ciccione (a modern American equivalent would be “Fatso”). According to the story he wrote later, Gage was eventually led to a two-room stone house where he found “a short, husky, unshaven man in bare feet.” This was Armando Cenere, a farm laborer and mason, who confessed to also being a tombarolo, or tomb robber. Later in the evening, sitting by his stove, Cenere further confessed that he had been one of a team of six men who had been digging nearby at Sant’Angelo in mid-November 1971, when they had turned up the base and handle of a Greek vase. He was detailed as “lookout” while the others cleared the entire tomb, a process that took a week. They found many pieces, including a winged sphinx, which they left in a field and then tipped off the police about it. This was to divert suspicion from themselves and what else they had found.

  Cenere recalled to Gage one piece of pottery that, he said, showed a man bleeding from three wounds. Shown a photograph of the Met’s Euphronios vase, he identified the portrait of the dying Sarpedon. He said he had been paid 5.5 million lire (about $8,800) as his (equal) share of the payoff.

  Cenere’s testimony, though vivid, was not conclusive. He could have been mistaken, he could have been inventing the details, in the hope of payment, or the limelight. If he and his friends did find the vase, and it was in pieces, it was unlikely that none of the breaks would cut across at least one of the figures’ faces. Certainly, Thomas Hoving didn’t accept the tombarolo’s version; he even said the Met was being “framed” by the Times.

  Eventually, the case came to court in Italy. In the witness box, Cenere went back on everything he had told the New York Times. He and Hecht were acquitted, though the latter was also declared persona non grata in Italy, to add to his similar status in Turkey. He moved to Paris.

  At the end of 1972, when von Bothmer gave his talk to the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (after which he was not voted on to the board of trustees), his subject was the myth of Sarpedon, illustrated with slides of its portrayal by the artist Euphronios. During the course of his presentation, von Bothmer showed not only scenes from the Met’s krater but also an earlier treatment of the same subject on a smaller cup, or kylix. In other words, this cup was a second unknown work by Euphronios. Wasn’t this an extraordinary coincidence—that the krater should show up after fifty years in Sarrafian’s collection, and then another piece should surface at the same time? Furthermore, what von Bothmer didn’t know just then was that the police investigations of the krater in Italy (following publication of the New York Times article) had, quite independently, uncovered rumors about the existence of a second Euphronios work—a kylix—also with a dying warrior scene. Tackled later by journalists, von Bothmer admitted that he had a photograph of the kylix but had never seen the cup itself. He wouldn’t show anyone the photograph, he said, since “the owner might have a prior claim on it” (although he had used the photo readily enough in his AIA lecture). Moreover, he didn’t know where the actual object was—“It’s supposed to be in Norway.”

  Discussing the kylix, Hoving and von Bothmer got themselves into a real muddle over who had seen what, and when. In the first place, Hoving changed his story. In an interview with David Shirey of the New York Times, he said at first that he had never seen the kylix, or even a photograph of it. Later, he telephoned back and said, “I want to be perfectly clear that I never saw the cup. I did see a photograph.” One reason for this change may have been that, late in the day, he recalled an interview he had given to a reporter from the London Sunday newspaper, the Observer, which was also interested in the Met’s controversial acquisition, because it might have been smuggled out of Britain. To an Observer reporter, Hoving admitted being offered—in fact, on that very day of the interview—a kylix by Euphronios, a cup that he said was signed, was in fragments, had pieces missing, but showed Sarpedon being carried off by Sleep and Death. Hoving told the reporter the cup had been made about twenty years before the krater.

  Later, still before Gage published the first of his articles, von Bothmer said it was Hecht who had the kylix and had had it since before he’d had the krater. On this occasion, von Bothmer also said that he had seen the kylix in Zurich, in July 1971, thus giving a different version to what he had said before, when he had claimed not to have seen the kylix and didn’t know where it was. He told the Observer reporter that he didn’t want to say too much more about the cup, because he wanted to buy it. There followed this exchange:OBSERVER: Isn’t it a good fortune for Robert Hecht . . . that he manages to have first the vase and then the cup?

  VON BOTHMER: The other way round—the cup has been owned for a couple of years, I was shown this cup in July 1971. [Pause.] I stopped in Zurich and I saw the cup and I have my notes and my dates. I would put it differently—the cup at the price then being quoted me was not nearly so exciting to me until after this object [the vase] appeared. Therefore, when you have two of a kind, it takes on greater significance.

  In other words, von Bothmer implied that the Euphronios krater had surfaced some time after July 1971, when he saw the cup in Zurich. Was he not then aware of Sarrafian’s letter to Hecht, dated July 10, 1971, affirming that the krater had been in the Sarrafian family for more than fifty years and that Hecht had already—by July 1971—seen it in Zurich?

/>   That was not the end of the confusion. A later affidavit by Sarrafian said that when he had made the vase available to Hecht, in 1971, it was in pieces and “Hecht was warned that I am not responsible for any missing pieces.” This was confusing and inconsistent on three grounds. First, he also said he had authorized its restoration “three years ago”—that is, in 1969. How could that be, if it hadn’t surfaced until July 1971? Second, Fritz Bürki had reported that when he received the vase in the summer of 1971, it had already been restored but “so badly I had to take it to pieces and restore it all over again.” Third, von Bothmer had said earlier that when he had first seen the vase it was not yet completely restored, so he had authorized Bürki to fill in the cracks and paint them over, for a fee of $800. No one account seemed to match another.

  Then there was the inconsistency about the nature of the fragmentation. In his affidavit, as mentioned above, Sarrafian had said that Hecht had been “warned that I was not responsible for any missing pieces.” How could Sarrafian know there were missing pieces, if the vase comprised between sixty and 100 fragments, as Hoving said? And in any case why should he worry when, again according to Hoving, the enormous price that the vase commanded lay partly in the fact that it was in perfect condition or, as one later document put it, 9944⁄100 percent complete, with just a few slivers missing?

  The price also seemed too neat: In his July 1971 letter, Sarrafian had instructed Hecht to sell the vase for “one million dollars and over if possible.” How did he choose such a high target price since, until then, the highest price a vase had sold for was $125,000?

  The improbabilities did not end there. Sarrafian told Gage that Hecht had taken the bulk of the money, in contrast to what he had said in the July 1971 letter, which specified a 10 percent commission to Hecht. “Bob was clever, I was stupid,” said Sarrafian. “I wouldn’t have given him an invoice—one dealer doesn’t usually give an invoice to another—but he specifically asked for one. He said he wanted it for tax purposes . . . I gave him an invoice saying he’s paid a fantastic price for the vase. I didn’t even get one quarter of a million dollars for it. The bulk of the money went to Hecht.”

  The final contradiction, in his letter dated July 10, 1971, is Sarrafian’s remark that in view of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East, he had decided to settle in Australia, “probably in N.S.W. [New South Wales],” and this was one reason he was selling. He never went. Sarrafian and his wife were killed in a car crash in Beirut, in 1977.

  In other words, the confusion about the Euphronios vase—where it came from, when it was assembled, who was paid what, what its relation was to the kylix—was fairly comprehensive. No wonder Dietrich von Bothmer’s fellow archaeologists, most of the trade, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic were so skeptical about the official version. Hecht had by then acquired a controversial reputation, though Hoving, von Bothmer, and the trustees of the museum appeared not to care very much.

  But there was one man who did. Oscar White Muscarella was an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Born in 1931, he had a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in classical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania, then the foremost archaeological school in the United States and one of the top three in the world. He had been a Fulbright scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and had excavated at Mesa Verde in Colorado, at Swan Creek in South Dakota, at Gordion in Turkey, and at five sites in Iran, in one of which he was director and in three others co-director. In 1974, he had just turned forty and was the author of one well-received academic book and at least twenty-six articles. His career also boasted another unusual distinction: Although he was still at the Met, he had been fired three times.

  It was a murky story that turned on—or appeared to turn on—Muscarella’s inability to cooperate with his colleagues, either in the field or in the museum itself. In fact, the objections to Muscarella had more to do with his involvement in museum politics than with his work. He had been active in championing the rights of women, who were paid less at the museum than men for identical positions, he had objected to the museum’s architects cutting down some large (“magnificent”) magnolia and elm trees to create space for a new wing, and perhaps most important, he had been one of several junior curators who had set up the Curators’ Forum—not quite a trade union, but clearly a threat to the Met’s established power structure. Then there was the fact that four times, in 1970, 1971, and 1972, he had written memoranda to the museum administration, calling for a change to its acquisitions policy in regard to antiquities, drawing attention to the fact that the Met was acquiring plundered and smuggled artifacts.

  He had first been fired, by Thomas Hoving, in July 1971, ostensibly because he could not get along with colleagues and therefore was unable to excavate properly. He was given six months’ academic leave to look for another position and was moved out of the Ancient Near Eastern Department. But Muscarella chose not to go quietly, hired himself a lawyer, and twice got the date for his departure postponed. In August 1972, he was fired again, and this time he was given just a month’s notice, mainly because the museum had acquired extra evidence that he was, allegedly, difficult to work with on excavations. This time Muscarella obtained a temporary injunction. At much the same time, the American National Labor Relations Board was investigating the Met because it had fired a number of other people because of union activity. As a result of this investigation, several museum employees were reinstated. Muscarella was one of them.

  When, in early 1973, the New York Times was investigating how the Euphronios vase had reached the Met, Muscarella said, to a Times reporter, that he was opposed to the purchase and expressed the view that the krater had been looted from Italy, not acquired, as Hoving and von Bothmer maintained, from Dikran Sarrafian in Beirut. He was also quoted as saying that he believed the museum trustees had not adequately questioned the provenance of the vase. “They have abdicated responsibility,” he said. “They should have checked out every possible origin of the vase before it was purchased.”

  Muscarella’s views were published in the Times on February 24, 1973. Four days later, at a staff policy meeting, Ashton Hawkins, a vice president of the museum and the Met’s in-house counsel, discussed Muscarella’s statements and announced, “We are definitely going to get rid of him now.”2 Muscarella later gave a television interview on the program Straight Talk, in which he again spoke against the purchase of the vase, and he wrote about “the curatorial role in plundering” in the Association of Field Archaeology News. At the end of 1973, Muscarella lectured to the Archaeological Institute of America, again on the curatorial role in looting, after which he was asked to give more lectures, on the same topic, to other organizations. In early 1974, his article in Field Archaeology News was reprinted in other academic journals.

  Later that year, in October 1974, he was fired for the third time, accused—in a letter of three and one-half pages—of unprofessional conduct, the letter terminating his employment on December 31 that year. By this time Muscarella’s attorney, Steven Hyman, a partner in the law firm of radical defense lawyer William Kunstler, was so dismayed by the Met’s tactics against his client that he had agreed to waive his fee. Hyman obtained an injunction, a full one this time, and the court appointed a fact finder, a lawyer acceptable to both sides, named Harry Rand. The twelve days of hearings were spread out between September 11, 1975, and November 26. Four months later, in March 1976, the fact finder produced a 1,379-page verdict—in which Muscarella was totally exonerated. Rand concluded that not one of Hoving’s allegations against the assistant curator “is sustained by the record.”

  That was not quite the end of the affair. Muscarella was reinstated, as he had to be, but the trustees didn’t approve the action until December that year, and it was not until May 1977 that the museum put in writing that he was “an Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art in good standing.” Moreover, the followin
g March, in 1978, Muscarella was notified that he was being “promoted” to “Senior Research Fellow.” He was told that this was the equivalent of being a full curator, but in fact he was being sidelined. Since 1978, Oscar White Muscarella has never received a salary raise, or any other promotion, except cost-of-living increases, and even those stopped in 2000.

  Criticizing Thomas Hoving and his policies, in particular with regard to the acquisition of the Euphronios krater, has exerted a heavy toll. But Muscarella, like the vase, is still—as we write—at the Metropolitan Museum. Over two decades later, events in Italy are vindicating him, and in more ways than even he could think possible.