Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Except, perhaps, this one. The bronze athlete in the cabbage patch may well have been one of those lining the pathways of Olympia, only to become war booty for Rome, whose glory slowly eclipsed that of Athens. As they swept through the Greek mainland and islands, Roman soldiers filled thousands of ships with plunder. Some three hundred years after its creation, around the time of Christ, the bronze athlete was likely torn from its pedestal in one such raid and loaded onto a waiting transport ship headed for Rome. The Adriatic was as fickle then as it is today, whipping up deadly storms without warning. The ship bearing the bronze athlete apparently sank to the sea floor, where it lay for two thousand years.

  As Barbetti touched the foul-smelling figure's nose, he clearly saw something he liked. He offered 3.5 million lire—about $4,000, enough to buy several houses in Fano at the time. The money was split among the crew. Captain Pirani's share was about $1,600, double his monthly wages.

  The bronze, meanwhile, was on the move.

  FEARFUL THAT POLICE would search the warehouse of his family's cement company, Barbetti deposited the statue in a church in Gubbio, where Father Giovanni Nagni wrapped it in a red velvet curtain and hid it in the sacristy. When the stench of the figure became overwhelming, Father Nagni moved it to his house and submerged it in a bathtub of salt water.

  A string of cars with foreign license plates began arriving with prominent antiquities dealers from across Europe. One brought with him an Italian restoration expert who, unsettled by the bronze's importance, informed the Carabinieri, Italy's national police. A raid was planned to seize the statue, but someone in town caught wind of it and warned Barbetti. When the Carabinieri arrived days later, the statue was gone. Some said it had been smuggled out of Italy in a car from Milan. Others claimed it had been packed on a boat filled with bootleg cigarettes, headed for France. Some even claimed that the Barbettis had coated the bronze in cement from their factory and shipped it to a monastery in Brazil.

  In 1966, with the statue still missing, the Carabinieri filed criminal charges against Barbetti and Father Nagni. Under Italy's cultural property law, archaeological objects found by chance after 1939 were the property of the state. Anyone found in possession of such objects was guilty of theft. Barbetti and Nagni were convicted and sentenced to jail, but Italy's highest court threw out the convictions in 1968, saying there was not enough evidence to establish that the statue had been found in Italian waters.

  The statue resurfaced in London three years later. It had apparently spent those years hidden in a monastery in Brazil before being sold for $700,000 to a Luxembourg-based art consortium called Artemis. When the German antiquities dealer Heinz Herzer, a member of the consortium, saw the statue in a London warehouse, he felt a chill go down his spine. He could clearly see through the crust of shells that it was an athlete—a favorite theme of ancient sculptors. But this was no typical work. This athlete's head was tilted back slightly to the left, as if he was gazing up at a stadium full of admirers. His long body was twisted slightly in the other direction, giving him an exquisite tension. Most striking was the way his right hand hovered just centimeters from the olive wreath on his head: an Olympian caught in a moment of victorious ecstasy.

  Herzer shipped the bronze to his studio in Munich, where he and a conservation expert spent weeks removing the centuries of encrustation with a scalpel, careful not to scratch the bronze underneath. He then had the bronze x-rayed, exposing a hollow interior stuffed with debris from the artist's workshop. Freed of its crustacean cocoon, the figure's skin showed an advanced case of "bronze disease," a destructive rust that leaves reddish spots of crystallized copper oxide on an object's surface. To arrest the corrosion, the bronze was immersed in a chemical bath. From then on, it would have to be kept at low humidity to prevent further damage.

  Carbon-14 dating confirmed that the statue predated Roman times. Herzer's research led him to the same conclusion as Barbetti. The skill and proportions of the work pointed to Lysippus. Could this be the only surviving example of the great master's work?

  To sell the figure for a price worthy of an original Greek masterpiece, Herzer needed only one more thing: the opinion of a reputable expert in ancient art. The German dealer decided to send photos and his detailed report to Bernard Ashmole, the curator of Greek and Roman art at the British Museum.

  Ashmole was widely revered for his scholarship and professionalism. He had become the keeper of Greek and Roman art in 1939, after British Museum officials discovered that his predecessor had allowed museum staff to scrub priceless monuments, including the Elgin Marbles, with steel wool. His counsel was widely sought by other curators and prominent collectors. When he received the package from Herzer, Ashmole immediately recognized the bronze as a masterpiece. What's more, he suspected that Herzer's attribution to Lysippus might be correct.

  In the spring of 1972, not long after receiving the photos, Ashmole got into his car and drove an hour outside London to a vast Tudor manor called Sutton Place. It belonged to one of the world's richest men and likely the only collector with ancient art who would have the money to acquire this superb piece.

  He had come to talk to J. Paul Getty.

  WHEN THE BRONZE athlete came his way, Getty was a shrunken, decrepit man. Nearly eighty years old, he hardly filled out the suit and tie he had worn like a uniform since his teens. Getty wasn't an angry man, but he looked like one. His heavily lidded eyes, framed by jowly cheeks, gave him a perpetual scowl. He kept his thoughts hidden behind a stony exterior. Photos invariably captured him in an awkward pose, arms at his side, chin down, expression blank. With a receding hairline, bulbous nose, and stiff demeanor, he bore a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon, a person for whom—along with Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Ringo Starr, and Queen Elizabeth II—Getty expressed admiration.

  Yet Getty's mind was still sharp enough to run a far-flung empire from an overstuffed chair in his study, surrounded by stacks of reports from Getty Oil and the two hundred other companies he controlled. Money had always been his chief passion, but women were a close second. Having divorced his fifth wife long before, Getty still kept a rotating harem of young women to satisfy his unquenchable libido. For years, he callously led them on with promises that he would "take care" of them in his will. Each evening during dinner, they jockeyed to sit at his right at the long, formal dining table, vying to be the one invited upstairs to the billionaire's bed.

  Getty micromanaged his empire down to two decimal places and kept daily tallies of his expenses—35 cents for candy, $1.05 for a sandwich. Visitors at Sutton Place were asked to use a pay phone for outgoing calls. His reputation as a skinflint had been sealed years earlier by his refusal to pay the ransom to free his grandson, who had been kidnapped by the Calabrian Mafia. Getty ignored their demands until the kidnappers sent a package containing one of his grandson's ears, complete with a distinguishing freckle, to a newspaper in Rome.

  If Getty was tight with his money, he was tighter with his praise. Of the five sons he fathered by four women, one died young (Getty missed the funeral because he was away on business) and the others were estranged, driven out of the family oil business and their father's life by Getty's incorrigible stinginess. Only his son George had shown promise in the family business and went on to become president of a Getty Oil subsidiary. After years of paternal indifference and disapproval, however, he committed suicide in 1973 by stabbing himself in the stomach, then swallowing an overdose of pills when he was hospitalized.

  Now alone, surrounded by servants and sycophants, Getty found his life incomplete. He had no heir to take over, and it was clear that Getty Oil was unlikely to live much beyond him. Only his art offered him the promise of life after death. "The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor," he once said.

  Getty had begun collecting art in the wake of the Great Depression, when loss weakened the strong hands holding many of the world's finest collections. His approach to art was n
ot so different from his approach to business. Getty was a bargain hunter, more interested in discovering the undervalued or overlooked than paying full price for an established masterpiece. He was hungry for that piece of art that, like a neglected plot of land purchased for pennies an acre, would gush fountains of wealth once its true value was recognized. On his annual travels across Europe in the late 1930s, Getty found that the threat of war and the persecution of Jews had opened up even noted collections, such as that of the Rothschild banking family. He went on a buying spree, picking up several bargains, including Rembrandt's Portrait of Marten Looten, which Getty picked up at an auction for $65,000—less, he noted in his journal, than its owner had paid for it a decade before.

  His early tastes were eclectic and inconsistent, fostered by his travels as a young man across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. He bought whatever caught his fancy, giving no particular thought to forming a coherent collection or even to consistent quality. Over time, he came to focus on eighteenth-century French furniture and tapestries; Persian and Savonnerie carpets; Renaissance paintings; and Greek and Roman antiquities.

  As his collecting increasingly conflicted with his parsimony, Getty regarded his art habit as a curse, even an addiction. He tried several times to quit, but after Fortune magazine dubbed him the world's richest man in 1957, the offers streamed in, and he couldn't help himself. "The habitual narcotics user is said to have a monkey on his back," he wrote in his autobiography. "I sometimes feel as if I had several dozen gorillas riding on mine."

  Art satisfied Getty's considerable intellectual appetite. He was fascinated by the science of art, by the mechanics of making it, and by the history it represented. Art was also a vehicle for Getty's intense fantasy life. It was a side he rarely revealed to those around him but that came out occasionally in his writings. "To me my works of art are all vividly alive. They're the embodiment of whoever created them—a mirror of their creator's hopes, dreams and frustrations," he wrote in Collector's Choice. "They have led eventful lives—pampered by the aristocracy and pillaged by revolution, courted with ardour and cold-bloodedly abandoned. They have been honored by drawing rooms and humbled by attics. So many worlds in their lifespan, yet all were transitory. What stories they could tell, what sights they must have seen! Their worlds have long since disintegrated, yet they live on."

  Ancient Greek and Roman art, in particular, appealed to Getty because of its ability to transport him back in time. He was a student of ancient history and conversant in Greek and Latin. He often visited archaeological sites on his travels and could name the Roman emperors in order. In a novella set in ancient Rome, Getty unabashedly compared his oil company to the Roman Empire and himself to Caesar. He quietly believed himself to be the reincarnation of the second-century A.D. Roman emperor Hadrian—a patron of the arts, a traveler, and a prolific builder. One of Getty's proudest acquisitions was the Lansdowne Herakles, a statue of the mythic Greek hero that had been salvaged in 1790 from the ruins of Hadrian's villa and remained in the family of the Marquis of Lansdowne in England for decades.

  Ashmole knew that Getty could be tempted to pay for a truly exceptional piece such as the bronze. Arriving at Sutton Place, he handed his coat to the butler, Bullimore, and showed himself upstairs to Getty's study. There the Oxford scholar handed Getty photos of the remarkable statue that had been fished from the sea.

  As Getty stared at the images, his hands shook with early signs of Parkinson's disease. It is a true masterpiece, Ashmole said, and would most certainly be the centerpiece of Getty's art collection. It would likely be the most important piece of ancient art in the United States.

  Getty needed little prodding. To him, the statue held the promise of legacy.

  ***

  JUST AS GETTY was learning about the bronze athlete, word of the statue reached a potential rival: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dietrich von Bothmer, the Met's venerable antiquities curator, heard about the lucky catch from his sources in the European antiquities market and passed the news on to the museum's director, Thomas Hoving.

  A tall, handsome man with laser-beam eyes and a commanding voice, Hoving was part scholar, part showman. His background was in Renaissance paintings, but his forte was the grand gesture. Months before hearing about the bronze, however, Hoving's craving for publicity had backfired badly.

  In a media blitz, Hoving and von Bothmer had revealed the acquisition of a fourth-century B.C. Greek vase adorned by Euphronios, the master Greek painter. The vase was a large krater, a wide-mouthed vessel in which wine was mixed with water before being served at ancient symposia. The remarkable painting on this krater elevated it to high art: a scene from the Iliad depicting the death of Sarpedon, Zeus's son. It was an arresting example of Euphronios's intricate brushwork, down to the individual feathers on the wings of the figures depicting Death and Sleep, who were carrying Sarpedon into the underworld. Only a handful of complete works by Euphronios survived, and none as majestic as the krater. The purchase of such an exquisite antiquity was a coup in itself. The price was $i million, some eight times the previous record for an antiquity.

  More problematic than the price, however, was the krater's provenance, or ownership history. The Met was vague about the vessel's origins, saying only that the museum had purchased it from a Lebanese dealer who had kept it, in shards, in a shoebox since World War II. Soon after the krater was revealed, however, the New York Times began running front-page stories suggesting that Itali an grave robbers had recently looted the krater from Cerveteri, an area near Rome honeycombed with ancient Etruscan tombs. The revelations continued for months, despite blanket denials by the museum.

  The fight over what became known as the Met's "hot pot" publicly aired a practice that museums had quietly followed for decades. Coming soon after the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the protection of cultural property, which Hoving had helped negotiate, the controversy outraged the public and pitted archaeologists against their museum colleagues over the morality of collecting looted antiquities. Archaeologists now openly called on museums and universities to honor the UNESCO treaty and stop buying artifacts that appeared on the market without a traceable pedigree.

  Hoving was still dodging questions about the vase when he decided to take a detour from a ski vacation in the Swiss Alps to visit Heinz Herzer's Munich workshop to see the bronze athlete. He ran his hands over the statue's mottled skin, now cleaned of its encrustations. He touched its face, the back of its legs, the underside of its arms. He looked at the modeling of the sculpture's fingernails, the details of the navel, the proportion of the penis. Hoving had studied archaeology, and he knew that Roman sculptors imitating Greek art had often left hidden areas unfinished. By contrast, true Greek sculpture was precise in its most minute details. After more than an hour of examining the piece, Hoving was convinced it was a great Greek work of art.

  But how to buy it? The Met might be famous, but it was hardly rich. Hoving had hawked the museum's collection of ancient coins to come up with the money for the krater. And there was no way he could outbid Getty, who wanted the sculpture as a centerpiece for the small museum in his home in Malibu. Hoving decided to propose a joint venture: if Getty would provide most of the money for the statue, the Met would reimburse him with loans from its considerable collection, and the two would share ownership of the bronze. Hoving flew to England to pitch the idea to Getty in person.

  After lengthy negotiations, Getty agreed to pay $3.9 million for the bronze—not one cent more. In return, he would receive several long-term loans from the Met, including a set of seventeen Pompeian frescoes that entranced him as Hoving projected slides of them onto a wall in Getty's study. They had been rescued from the ashes of a villa at Boscotrecase that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The villa had been owned by the grandson of the emperor Augustus.

  But before buying the bronze, Getty insisted on a series of assurances about the statue's legal status: clarification of how the bronze had l
eft Italy, legal research certifying that Herzer's consortium had clear title, and a written guarantee from the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Carabinieri that there would be no further claims. He also required Artemis to give him a five-year, money-back guarantee in case the Italians or another foreign government filed a patrimony claim.

  They were exceptional precautions, underscoring Getty's unease. Even the Met's von Bothmer expressed some reservations about the statue's "mysterious export." As it turned out, both men's concerns were well-founded.

  During negotiations, German and Italian police arrived unexpectedly at Herzer's Munich studio with questions about the bronze. What did Herzer know about the statue's disappearance from Italian soil and its supposed side trip to South America? How had he learned about the statue? When Herzer refused to cooperate, an Italian state prosecutor filed a request to have Herzer extradited to Italy to stand trial for trafficking in looted art. The dealer escaped arrest only because German authorities refused to honor the request.

  The deal to buy the bronze came undone. The statue eluded Getty's grasp just as he was building another kind of legacy—one out of concrete and controversy.

  TWO DECADES EARLIER, the J. Paul Getty Museum had been born as a tax shelter. When Getty left Los Angeles for Europe in 1951, he left behind a sprawling ranch house in a quiet canyon off the Pacific Coast Highway. The house was filled to the rafters with Getty's growing art collection. There was so much art, in fact, that Getty began giving it away. But after donating two of his most prized possessions—the sixteenth-century Ardabil carpet and Rembrandt's 1632 Portrait of Marten Looten—to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty grew unhappy with the anemic tax write-offs he received for the gifts.