The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Sotheby’s was pressed to withdraw the vases by a special representative of the Italian government, who flew to London for the purpose, and by Professor Felice Lo Porto, superintendent of antiquities in the Puglia region, who let it be known that a large, fourth-century BC tomb near Arpi (an old, rich settlement near Foggia) had recently been looted. He said he believed the Sotheby’s vases came from there. Other British museums, such as the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, joined the British Museum in calling for Sotheby’s to withdraw the objects, and Lord Jenkins of Putney, a former minister of the arts, formally raised the issue in Parliament.

  Despite the negative publicity, aired in the London Observer, Sotheby’s took the view that there was “no evidence” that the vases it was selling were either looted or smuggled. When Peter Watson spoke to Felicity Nicholson, the company’s head of antiquities, in preparation for writing an article on the subject, she said, “I don’t think one ever knows where antiquities come from. We assume our clients have title to whatever it is they are selling.” She went on to describe Cook as “fussy, someone who doesn’t necessarily reflect the whole of scholarly opinion.”

  Despite the opposition, the sale went ahead and the vases sold quite well. The art world is nothing if not cynical, and maybe the publicity had even helped. After a fruitless few days in London, the Italian special envoy flew home and the scandal died down. But James Hodges, watching this exchange from his unique vantage point as administrator in the Antiquities Department, knew that all the Apulian vases that Brian Cook reckoned to have been illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy had been consigned to Sotheby’s by one man. This man, Christian Boursaud, was a Swiss dealer with offices in Geneva and a shop called the Hydra Gallery.

  Furthermore, from his vantage point, Hodges was well placed to watch events unfold. A couple of months after the scandal, Boursaud wrote to Felicity Nicholson, announcing the closure of his gallery, an event he blamed on ill health. When Nicholson replied, Hodges noted the wording of her letter: “With regard to the property we have here, I understand that you have been acting as the agent for the owner and we will of course wait to hear from him regarding the disposition of the rest of the property we have here from him for sale” (italics added).

  Mulling over this wording, and listening to Felicity Nicholson in conversation with other specialists in the Antiquities Department, Hodges came to believe that in fact Boursaud was merely a “front” and that the true owner of the Boursaud objects, the real force behind the trade, was a certain Giacomo Medici. And the reason Boursaud was backing out was not ill health but because he and Medici had fallen out after the publicity surrounding the Sotheby’s sale.

  Hodges, in his uniquely qualified position at Sotheby’s, never heard from Boursaud again, but he later realized that the range of goods consigned by the Hydra Gallery was much the same as those now being offered by a new gallery: Editions Services. In the July 1987 sale, there was a marble pilaster that had hitherto belonged to Hydra, had failed to sell, and was now being sold as the property of Editions Services. So there could now be no doubt: The Hydra Gallery had reinvented itself as Editions Services. Whoever was behind the companies was a prudent man. And the person behind the Hydra Gallery and Editions Services was one and the same: Giacomo Medici.

  Throughout the 1980s, Giacomo Medici probably sold more antiquities at Sotheby’s than any other single owner. Over the years, thousands of objects from Medici had passed through the London salesroom and millions of pounds had changed hands. None of the antiquities had any provenance because all were illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.

  There was more. The documentation supplied by Hodges showed that the registered address of Editions Services was 7 Avenue Krieg in Geneva, and that it was registered in the name of Henri Albert Jacques. The documents showed that these details—Avenue Krieg and H. A. Jacques—were also used by another company that consigned many unprovenanced antiquities to Sotheby’s. This was a company called Xoilan Trader, Inc., the beneficial owner of which was Robin Symes. Other documents that Hodges took showed that Symes and Felicity Nicholson, boss of antiquities at Sotheby’s, had collaborated to smuggle a statue of the Egyptian Lion Goddess out of Italy. It was a cozy, close-knit world, which was exposed in a British TV program only days after the Carabinieri raid on Corridor 17.

  It was not long before Conforti got in touch with the British investigation.

  Why was it that police in Italy and journalists in Britain were in the same place, at the same time, investigating the same people engaged in the same illicit practices? To an extent, of course, it was an accident, the result of Hodges’s predicament at Sotheby’s. But there was a deeper reason, too, which accounted for why Hodges was able to observe what he did observe inside Sotheby’s. The fact is that attitudes toward, and laws about, dealing in unprovenanced (and therefore very probably illegally excavated and smuggled) antiquities have been steadily changing as views on morality have evolved over the years. Those countries that are the source of archaeological material—the civilizations around the Mediterranean, in Central and South America, West Africa, and Asia—have been taking an increasingly robust line to protect what they see as their heritage. This has partly to do with cultural identity in newly independent countries, in particular after World War II, and partly to do with tourism, because properly excavated archaeological sites can be major attractions, and therefore sources of revenue.

  Isolated attempts to control the movement of cultural property date back to early laws in Greece (1834), Italy (1872), and France (1887). After World War I, the newly formed League of Nations held discussions on the imposition of controls over the illicit exploitation of cultural property—in particular antiquities—but the resulting Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified. Throughout the 1930s, action on this topic at the League was coordinated by the Office International des Musées (OIM). Although a draft “Convention on the Repatriation of Objects of Artistic, Historical or Scientific Interest, Which Have Been Lost, Stolen or Unlawfully Alienated or Exported” was prepared, there were strong objections from the art market countries (in particular the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States), and in 1939, with the outbreak of war, the initiative came to an end. After the war, in 1946, UNESCO took an interest in a convention to protect cultural property in times of war, which led to The Hague Convention of 1954 and, two years later, to a number of recommendations “on international principles applicable to archaeological excavations.” This specifically proposed that the art trade should do nothing to “encourage smuggling of archaeological material.” In the 1960s, as a result of initiatives by Peru and Mexico, UNESCO adopted stronger recommendations “to improve the international moral climate in this respect” and this led, in 1964, to a Committee of Experts being set up, from some thirty countries, whose task it was to prepare a draft convention. This body eventually produced, in 1970, UNESCO’s “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,” adopted on November 14 that year, by the general conference of UNESCO at its sixteenth session. This is not the only law or regulation governing these issues; there are also a number of trade agreements relating to the import and export of cultural material. But the 1970 convention has generally been taken as a watershed in this field. Although many archaeologists are against the international traffic in all archaeological material, period, most now take what they see as a more practical, pragmatic approach—that one shouldn’t deal in, or have anything to do with, antiquities that have no provenance and first came to light since 1970, the date of the UNESCO convention. Objects in collections formed before 1970, and which have no provenance, may have been illicitly excavated, but the main priority is to stop the looting now, and for this the 1970 date is sufficiently modern.

  Not all states ratified the convention with equal enthusiasm. Here are the ratification dates for a variety of states, from which a pattern will be evident: Cyprus,
1980; Egypt, 1973; France 1997; Greece, 1981; Italy, 1979; Jordan, 1974; Peru, 1980; Turkey, 1981; United Kingdom, 2003; United States, 1983. Denmark, Holland, and Germany have still to ratify the 1970 convention. Switzerland did so in 2004. In other words, there is still a reluctance to do so on the part of most market states.

  This is despite evidence that the world’s archaeological heritage—the material remains of past human activities—is being destroyed at an undiminished pace. In 1983, one study showed that 58.6 percent of all Mayan sites in Belize had been damaged by looters. Between 1989 and 1991, a regional survey in Mali registered 830 archaeological sites, of which 45 percent had already been damaged, 17 percent badly. In 1996, a sample of eighty were revisited and the incidence of looting had increased by 20 percent. A survey in a district of northern Pakistan showed that nearly half the Buddhist shrines, stupas, and monasteries had been badly damaged or destroyed by illegal excavation. In Andalusia, Spain, 14 percent of known archaeological sites have been damaged by illicit excavation. Between 1940 and 1968, it is estimated that something like 100,000 holes were dug in the Peruvian site of Batan Grande and that in 1965 the looting of a single tomb produced something like ninety pounds of gold jewelry, which accounts for about 90 percent of the Peruvian gold now found in collections around the world. In 1997, in the Qinghai Province of China, the ancient tombs at Reshui, one of the country’s “Ten Most Famous Archaeological Sites,” were looted by more than 1,000 local people, “who ‘excavated’ the tombs with high explosives and bulldozers.” In Inner Mongolia the government estimates that between 4,000 and 15,000 tombs have been looted, and overall, the Chinese authorities estimate that between 5,000 and 12,000 looted objects reach the market every year. He Shuzhong, of the National Administration on Cultural Heritage in Beijing, who provided these figures, told us that one Chinese tourist company even runs a course on illicit excavation. He himself was physically assaulted on one occasion when he chanced upon looters at a site. In Niger, archaeologists at the Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey estimate that in the Bura, Bangare, and Jebu areas of the country, more than 90 percent of the sites have been looted, and in other areas, such as Windigalo and Kareygooru, 50 percent have been destroyed. And this is nowhere near the end of it.

  The looting of Iraq is of course well known—between the end of the first Gulf war, in 1991, and 1994, eleven regional museums were broken into and 3,000 artifacts and 484 manuscripts taken, of which only fifty-four have been recovered. Following the second Gulf war, in April 2003, at least 13,515 objects were stolen from the Baghdad Museum, of which, by June 2004, something like 4,000 had been recovered. Despite the Taliban’s high-profile demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas for “religious” reasons, most of the destruction of Afghanistan has been wrought by the search for salable antiquities and manuscripts; it has continued, if not actually worsened, since the Taliban’s removal from power.

  Further information about the material scale of the illegal trade can be extracted from official police statistics. In Turkey, for example, between 1993 and 1995 there were more than 17,500 official police investigations into stolen antiquities. In 1998, the Turkish Department of Smuggling and Organized Crime reported that in the previous year, 565 people had been arrested who had, between them, more than 10,000 archaeological objects in their possession. Greek police reported that between 1987 and 2001, they recovered 23,007 artifacts. In one year, 1997, German police in Munich recovered fifty to sixty crates containing 139 icons, sixty-one frescoes, and four mosaics that had been torn from the walls of northern Cypriot churches.

  The Italian experience is just as bad. The Carabinieri Art Squad was founded in 1969—just as the 1970 UNESCO convention was being prepared—as a result of an upsurge in looting and black-market trading associated with the postwar rise in prosperity of the West and the increasing sophistication of the art market. The official title of this new unit was the “Comando Carabinieri Ministero Pubblica Istruzione—Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistica” (Ministry of Education Carabinieri Division—Unit for the Defense of Cultural Heritage), or TPA for short. Italy at that point became the first country to have a police department specifically assigned to combat art and archaeological crimes. In 1975, the TPA became part of the new Ministry of Fine Arts and the Environment and moved into the fine building it still occupies, designed by Filippo Raguzzini (1680–1771). A computerized database was developed as early as 1980. Among the TPA’s high-profile recoveries have been Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, stolen from Urbino in 1975 and recovered in Switzerland a year later; Raphael’s Esterhazy Madonna, stolen in Budapest in 1983 and recovered in Greece two months later; in addition to the recovery of works by Dürer, Tintoretto, and Giorgione. The TPA has helped train the art squads of other nationalities, including Palestinians and Hungarians; following the second Gulf war, in 2003, the Italians were asked to help organize the security at Iraq’s many archaeological sites. Since it was created, the TPA (today the TPC) has recovered more than 180,000 works of art, nearly 8,000 of them abroad, and more than 350,000 antiquities. It has exposed 76,000 forgeries and brought charges against nearly 12,000 people.

  In the 1980s, dealers in the market countries introduced codes of ethics, and museums revised their acquisitions policies but, very often, it has to be said, these moves were not much more than window dressing. In the 1990s, UNESCO sought to tighten up the 1970 convention, in particular with regard to the level of “due diligence” that dealers, collectors, and museums must use when acquiring cultural property without a fully documented history. This resulted in the so-called UNIDROIT convention, which was adopted by member countries in 1995 and came into force in July 1998. This convention says, in effect, that dealers, collectors, and museums must take active steps, or “due diligence,” to satisfy themselves that cultural property without an adequate documented history has not been illegally excavated or smuggled. In other words, the onus is on the “good faith” purchaser to prove his or her good faith. In the United Kingdom, a new law was introduced in 2004 that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly trade in illicitly excavated archaeological objects.

  Thus, there was a crucial change in attitude in the 1990s, the fruit of what had gone before. And this formed part of the “deep background” to both the Carabinieri’s investigations of the illicit antiquities trade in Italy and our own journalistic investigations. The Italian Art Squad recognized that, eventually, it would have to take on the source of the demand for antiquities—the auction houses, and the dealers, museums, and collectors in the market countries—which is what made the discovery of the organigram so important. And Hodges realized that, having been sent to jail and humiliated by Sotheby’s intransigence, he was in a position to seriously embarrass Sotheby’s and do irreparable harm to the illicit antiquities network. As administrator in the relevant department, he had been vividly aware of the background legal, law enforcement, and archaeological issues swirling around the lucrative business of unprovenanced antiquities and the routine need at Sotheby’s for subterfuge and deception. Faced with his particular, personal predicament, he was in a unique position to do something about it.

  3

  CONNOISSEURS AND CRIMINALS—THE PASSION FOR GREEK VASES

  SCULPTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN POPULAR and has been created afresh throughout history. Its appeal and beauty are obvious. Vases are different. Like sculpture, ceramics have been produced throughout history and in many different locations. But Greek vases stand out, partly for the great variety of their shapes, but mainly for the drama of the paintings that grace those shapes and are so different from anything else. These factors have combined to produce in art lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors a greater level of passion for Greek vases than for any other kind.

  Given the sheer numbers of vases that have been excavated, there can be little doubt about their popularity in antiquity. An Athenian fifth-century BC poet, listing the most noteworthy products of different peoples, praised Athens for its invention of the potter’s wheel a
nd “the child of clay and the oven, noblest pottery.” Plato wrote that a fine clay vase can be “very beautiful” though “not when set beside maidens.” Pliny observed that in his day (he died in AD 79, observing the eruption of Vesuvius), “the greater part of mankind uses earthenware vases.” Some Roman graves have been found containing Greek and Etruscan vases, but not many.

  In more modern times, however, the passion for collecting these extraordinary relics of the past did not really emerge until the middle of the eighteenth century. There were vases in Renaissance collections (for example, the Medici in Florence had a vase collection, according to Giorgio Vasari, who wrote biographies of many artists), and ancient vases are mentioned in five collections in a Roman guidebook of the time. But their eighteenth-century popularity followed the discovery—in the late 1730s and then throughout the 1740s—of the buried remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had been overwhelmed in AD 79 when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, spreading ash over a wide range and completely obliterating whole cities across a large area. The excavation of entire towns—whose inhabitants had been so surprised at the suddenness of the eruptions that they had been trapped going about their everyday activities, with their bodies as it were “frozen” for all time—captured the imagination of Europeans and others and was one of the factors that made archaeology popular. It was a vivid episode with which everyone could identify. Whole rooms, whole houses, entire temples and tombs, rows of shops and villas, even complete theaters, were recovered over the decades, together with fabulous frescoes, important sculptures, hoards of silver, armor, and other objects, some of them luxurious, some of them common-or-garden variety, all of them fascinating for the vivid light they threw on the past.