Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  For other board members, the question was not if but when to play the Aphrodite as a trump card with the Italians. Why lay it on the table unless the Getty knew the endgame?

  A MONTH AFTER Brand and Li visited Rome, one of Greece's top government prosecutors went to Italy to strategize with Ferri. The two countries shared the same goal—the return of looted art and the end of predatory collecting practices. Greece had noted Ferri's success at leveraging cooperation while holding out the threat of criminal prosecution. If it had not been for the criminal case against True, the Greeks recognized, the Met would never have agreed to a deal.

  In April, Greek authorities borrowed a page from Ferri's playbook and swooped down on True's Páros home, seizing seventeen unregistered antiquities, mostly ancient architectural scraps that were common in most Greek households. Agents nevertheless were inflamed by the find and took particular umbrage when they discovered a framed poster of Alexander the Great next to True's toilet.

  The raid was mostly for effect. Greece had a new culture minister—his predecessor's party had lost the national elections—who had already invited Brand and Li to Athens in May for discussions about the funerary wreath and three other contested objects. This raised the stakes for those talks.

  Despite the Greeks' initial use of strong-arm tactics, they took a far more academic approach to their negotiations. When the two sides met in May, instead of hammering Getty officials with suspicion and innuendo, the director of the National Archaeological Museum spoke to them about the significance of art in ancient Greece. Another seni or cultural official detailed the history and craftsmanship of ancient funerary wreaths, down to the minutely coiled twigs and shimmering gold leaves. The winding of the thread on the Getty's wreath, he noted, was consistent with workshops in Macedonia. The measured approach particularly appealed to Brand, who was desperately looking for some way to expand repatriation discussions beyond legalisms.

  Following the meeting, the Getty quickly agreed to return a fourth-century B.C. Hellenistic tombstone and the fifth-century B.C. marble relief that J. Paul Getty had purchased in 1955. But Brand asked for more information on the other two objects, a marble statue and the golden wreath, which the Getty had bought for a total of $4.45 million. Although not as iconic as the Aphrodite, the wreath was one of a kind and had been featured on the cover of the museum's antiquities masterpieces book. It had also been one of True's favorites. Greek officials would not be put off and made it known that their decadelong investigation of the funerary wreath would soon lead to criminal charges being filed against True.

  The Greeks sent the Getty color photographs of the wreath—images authorities had seized from one of its alleged smugglers. The photos matched several black-and-white photographs that True had long ago received from Christoph Leon, the wreath's dealer. Li's team also found True's written exchange with Leon, in which she concluded that the object was "too dangerous for us to be involved with" shortly before the Getty bought it.

  The museum soon announced that it was sending back both the statue and the wreath.

  For years, the Getty had been frozen, unwilling to return objects that were clearly looted for fear of doing damage to True's legal situation. Now, with the new leadership, that had changed. The decision to return the wreath was a tacit admission that it was illicit, yet the Getty said nothing to defend its former curator when announcing the decision. Days later, a Greek prosecutor charged True with trafficking the golden wreath. She would now face trial in two countries.

  True had largely been silent since her departure from the Getty, but the return of the wreath and the Greek prosecutor's charges drove her over the edge. In a bitter letter to three senior Getty officials, she tore into her former colleagues. "Once again you have chosen to announce the return of objects that are directly related to criminal charges filed against me by a foreign government ... without a word of support for me, without any explanation of my role in the institution, and without reference to my innocence." The Getty's "calculated silence," she continued, "has been acknowledged universally, especially in the archaeological countries, as a tacit acceptance of my guilt." The Getty had made her the scapegoat for more senior officials—she never mentioned Gribbon, Walsh, or Williams by name—who had been "fully aware of the risks" of buying the suspect antiquities.

  AT FIRST BLUSH, a similar regime change in Italy seemed to be just as lucky for the Getty. When Olson, Li, and Brand returned to Rome with the Getty's initial offer in June, the conservative culture minister Buttiglione had been replaced after national elections by Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome and a center-left politician with Clintonesque charisma.

  Tall, with square features, neatly cut gray hair, and twinkling blue eyes, Rutelli made women swoon when he walked into a room. He was the great-grandson of the famous Italian artist Mario Rutelli, who had sculpted the winged victory on the Piazza Venezia monument to Italian independence. As mayor of Rome, Rutelli had overseen the renovation and construction of new museums for the 2000 Jubilee celebration and showed an appreciation for the economic benefits of cultural tourism.

  In a warm-up meeting with the Getty visitors, the new minister turned on the charm. He told them that once, while on vacation in the United States, he had driven two hundred miles out of his way to visit the Getty. Then he admitted Italy's responsibility for its share in the looted antiquities equation. "We Italians have a lot of responsibility in this. This is not only your problem. We should have done a better job. But we must resolve this."

  The Getty contingent assured Rutelli that it understood Italy's position. "We got the message," one member said. "The whole museum world got the message."

  From there, the sides plunged into two days of tense negotiations. The talks reached a boiling point when, on June 18, the Los Angeles Times revealed that an internal Getty assessment had concluded that the museum had purchased 350 antiquities valued at more than $100 million from suspect dealers—far more than it had admitted publicly. Olson and Li tried to explain that the study was for accounting purposes only, but the Itali ans grew surly. They demanded the Getty's secret list and threatened to add dozens more antiquities to their current list of fifty-two contested objects. But both sides simmered down enough to sit through MTO's presentation of its findings. The Getty agreed in principle to return twenty-four antiquities, with the rest—including the Getty Bronze and the Aphrodite—held over for further discussion. In a joint statement, the Getty and Italy's Culture Ministry announced a breakthrough deal in which the museum would return "a number of very significant" pieces. For its part, Italy promised to loan the Getty objects of "comparable visual beauty and historical importance."

  Within hours, however, the deal had come undone. When a jet-lagged Li finally arrived home, he was confronted with an Associated Press report in which Fiorilli, who had suddenly excused himself from the final negotiating session, declared that there was no agreement and the two sides were far apart. Fiorilli was scuttling the deal in part to object to the Getty's legalistic approach to the negotiations, which came across to the Italians as being more interested in protecting the assets of the trust than in acknowledging the patrimony claims. Fiorilli had become convinced that the MTO attorneys were being paid a percentage for every Getty antiquity they saved. He began privately to deride Olson and Li as "carpet sellers" and to complain bitterly that the Getty was bringing a "commercial view" to a cultural issue. "The problem is always this," he said, "money, money, money."

  ***

  THE ITALIANS' REGARD for the Getty team fell even lower after the Culture Ministry struck a quick deal with Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for the return of thirteen objects the museum had bought between the early 1970s and the late 1990s for $834,000. The MFA had agreed to give the items back after just five months of quiet talks with the Italians, with no bickering over one-to-one loans or demands for legal proof of the objects having been looted.

  A confession was not a condition of the deal. Like the Met, the MFA
now tacitly acknowledged that the objects had been looted but claimed that it had all been a big mistake. "When we acquired these objects, we did it in good faith," said Malcolm Rogers, the museum's director. "We in Boston are committed, alongside the Italian government, to seeing the end of illicit excavations and the illicit trade in antiquities." What he did not say was that Italy had gathered evidence that the museum possessed four dozen more objects acquired from Hecht, Medici, and other dealers implicated in the looting investigation. The MFA had long been one of the principal players in the American antiquities trade. After all, the museum's former antiquities curator, Cornelius Vermeule, had been one of Hecht's closest friends and longtime customers, as well as a mentor of True and a close colleague of von Bothmer at the Met. Given the museum's legal exposure, it was getting off easy with the swift return of just thirteen items.

  Rutelli and his staff crowed about the deal during a September press conference, held in one of the Culture Ministry's ornate meeting halls, where Carabinieri in dress uniforms guarded the returned objects. They included a second-century white marble statue of Sabina, wife of the Roman emperor Hadrian. In hailing the MFA's spirit of cooperation, the Italians were drawing a sharp contrast to the Met and the Getty. Unlike the Met, the MFA did not demand loans in exchange for all the returned objects and delivered them as soon as the deal was struck. And unlike the Getty, it did not resist.

  "We're talking about true collaboration," Rogers said to underscore the point. "Not an eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth."

  Times had certainly changed. After decades of intransigence, America's two leading museums were now trying to one-up each other in the deals they had struck with Italy. Meanwhile, the Getty, with the most at stake, was struggling to find common ground with Italy.

  IN OCTOBER, OLSON, Li, and Brand tried one more time to nail down a deal. Flying to Rome again, the Getty team expanded the trust's offer from twenty-four to twenty-six objects and then played its trump card—the Aphrodite. Brand offered to share title to the goddess if the Italians would collaborate on scientific tests over the next four years to determine the statue's true origins. If, at the end of that period, the tests were inconclusive, the matter would be put to an arbitrator to decide.

  The offer represented the first time the Getty acknowledged that it was willing to give up the goddess, but the jaded Itali ans were not impressed. Fiorilli's team rejected the Aphrodite deal, even as it agreed to memorialize the understanding about the other twenty-six objects. Translators labored for hours over versions of the agreement in English and Italian, and Olson and Fiorilli signed each of the ten pages. But once again, the agreement fell apart. Waiting in the British Airways lounge in London, Olson received a call from Rutelli's political attaché, who said that his boss had become upset while reviewing certain portions of the agreement.

  "You're not going to back out of this agreement, are you?" Olson said. "You're going to live by it, aren't you?"

  The Rutelli aide hedged. Olson suspected that the agreement created a political problem for Rutelli because it failed to include a clear return of either the Aphrodite or the Getty Bronze.

  WHILE IN ROME, Li had arranged for a meeting with True and her attorneys. Since True had been forced to resign, relations between the two parties had been nearly nil. The slow-motion criminal procedure was taking its toll on the curator. On her sole appearance at the courthouse, she had been mobbed by gawkers and paparazzi. The next day, the dramatic photos appeared in newspapers around the world, showing True in her oversize sunglasses, doing the "perp walk" to court while being shielded from the cameras with her purse. The Getty was still paying her legal bills but had otherwise distanced itself from her defense, as the return of the funerary wreath to Greece had painfully demonstrated. Yet the fate of the curator and her former museum were still inextricably linked by Italy's case against True.

  Li advised True that the Getty was getting close to reaching an agreement with Italy. It would involve the return of many of the objects involved in her criminal trial. He said the return might provide leverage that otherwise would not exist for True and her lawyers. Perhaps the two parties should coordinate their efforts to give the return the maximum possible impact on her case. Without saying it outright, Li was suggesting that True should cut her losses and see if she could obtain some leniency by admitting her actions.

  True's lawyers politely declined. Backed into a corner, True had become adamant about giving no ground in her legal case. In public statements as curator, she had often acknowledged that American museums had routinely bought objects they had every reason to believe had been looted. But making a similar admission now about herself, after everything that had happened, proved more difficult for her.

  Ferri had repeatedly said that he'd consider wrapping up the trial quickly if True would give him a statement acknowledging her role in the black market. Her most recent effort had failed to satisfy him. In a written statement dated October 17, True had gone farther than she had in her 2001 deposition, acknowledging more intimate knowledge of the risky antiquities market even before she became curator: "I was aware of the corruption that has pervaded the antiquities market for centuries and while Curator, I openly and frankly acknowledged the problems."

  Yet she also made clear that all of her recommended acquisitions had to be reviewed by the chief curator, the museum director, the registrar, the in-house counsel, and the CEO before they were ultimately approved by the board of trustees. Everyone at the Getty was aware of the problems in the antiquities market, she said. "It was, in fact, clear to all that ... the antiquities market was ... crowded with a number of objects of dubious origin and provenance and sometimes of dubious authenticity," True wrote. "Whenever objects of unknown provenance were proposed for acquisition, the Getty administration and I recognized the possibility that claims relating to such objects might subsequently arise."

  Regarding the Aphrodite, she wrote, "There was no question that the piece originally came from South Italy or Sicily, but exactly when and from where was always a question." Trying to explain her decision back in 1996 not to meet with the statue's former owner, Renzo Canavesi, she said simply, "The difficulty of confirming unsolicited allegations and rumors can be time-consuming, expensive and inconclusive."

  For Ferri, the statement left a wide gulf between the curator and culpability. While condemning "unscrupulous dealers," True continued to defend the Getty's acquisition policy and portray herself as the champion of returning artifacts to Italy. Nowhere did she acknowledge making a single mistake.

  Ferri was disappointed. True was still not willing to be honest.

  LIKE DISBELIEVING WITNESSES needing to revisit a corpse, Olson, Li, and Brand returned one more time to Rome in November. The city was abuzz with the impending wedding of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in nearby Bracciano. The Getty team came fortified with a new antiquities acquisition policy, which committed the museum to purchasing objects only if they had been legally exported before November 17, 1970, the date of the UNESCO Convention. Lost in the maelstrom of breaking news about the negotiations, the policy represented the most progressive collecting policy of any leading American museum.

  Ushered into Rutelli's office, the Getty team found the culture minister bidding farewell to the world-famous Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, whose controversial new loggia was under construction at the Uffizi in Florence. Charming as usual, Rutelli led them to an arrangement of couch and chairs at one end of the room—a beautifully appointed space that featured lighted alcoves reaching up to the twenty-foot ceiling.

  Waiting for them were Fiorilli, Proietti, and the head of the Carabinieri. Everyone got down to business. Brand put on the table his best deal: no Getty Bronze, but the twenty-six objects agreed to earlier and full title to the Aphrodite. All he asked was that the Getty be allowed to hold on to the statue for a year to conduct additional tests—enough time to help his colleagues in the museum community feel comfortable with the decision to give up the ic
on.

  Not good enough, said the Italians. They wanted all fifty-two objects in their dossier, including the Getty Bronze, about which the Italians had suddenly grown adamant. The shift in attitude seemed to coincide with increasing pressure from the residents of Fano, the sentimental hometown of the Lysippus statue and a stronghold of Rutelli's center-left party. Local schoolchildren had begun sending postcards by the hundreds to the Getty pleading for the statue, and area politicians were pressuring Rutelli not to back down.

  The scene in Rutelli's office lapsed into the surreal when he went to his desk to take a phone call. "Maestro!" he exclaimed. It was director Franco Zeffirelli, who was staging a production of Aida at La Scala. Meanwhile, Fiorilli launched into a rant against Marion True and the Fleischmans. With hope slipping away, Li nearly shouted to interrupt him.

  "Maurizio, are you saying that if we give you twenty-six items and the Aphrodite but keep the bronze, there's no deal?"

  Fiorilli kept talking.

  "Maurizio ... the Aphrodite. You can have her. She's yours."

  Fiorilli seemed unfazed. Li then turned to Proietti and said, "Are you saying that if we want to give you the twenty-six objects without the bronze, you won't take them?"

  Proietti answered quietly, "Yes."

  "Then there's nothing left to talk about," Olson said.

  Li, Brand, and Olson stood up to leave. They extended the Getty's wishes to continue the conversation but said there wasn't much more they could do. Rutelli, now off the phone, came over to smooth things over, but the Getty team walked to the door.