Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Back at the hotel, Brand and Li sat at a small table in the lobby, ordered Scotch, and, as Hollywood celebrities drifted in and out on their way to the TomKat nuptials, spent hours writing a lengthy letter to Rutelli. This time, they weren't going to keep quiet while the Italians beat them up in what had become a struggle for public opinion. This was a unilateral statement that would be released to the press.

  In it, Brand expressed his sadness at the impasse but gave the Getty's justifications for walking away. The Culture Ministry's demands for the Getty Bronze were "unfounded, late in coming and—with all due respect—unreasonable."

  As for the Aphrodite, the museum would press ahead with studies of its origins. "If the studies demonstrate that the statue should be transferred to Italy," Brand wrote, "we will transfer it."

  22. A BRIGHT LINE

  IN EARLY 2007, when American museum directors met for their winter meeting, topping the agenda was the burgeoning antiquities scandal. The meeting was noteworthy for who was missing. Philippe de Montebello, the dean of American museum directors, was having double knee-replacement surgery. The symbolism was rich, some noted. For in his absence, de Montebello's hard-line position was having its legs taken out by the younger generation of museum directors, who felt reform was overdue. It was the first time in memory such views had been aired so openly.

  The discussion was remarkable not just for its candor but for the fact that it was taking place at all. The Association of Art Museum Directors seemingly had settled the antiquities matter three years earlier with the new acquisition guidelines favored by de Montebello, which recommended that antiquities have an ownership history going back just ten years. Now the Getty's decision to break ranks and adopt 1970 as a "bright-line" cut-off date reopened the debate.

  Michael Brand was almost jocular in sketching for his colleagues the preliminary findings of the Getty's internal investigation, particularly when it came to the Aphrodite. "The idea that this was on a donkey cart from Sicily to Paris is highly improbable," Brand said wryly, poking fun at the Canavesi story. There was no feigning ignorance now about the statue's origins. Weeks earlier, the Los Angeles Times had published the results of a months-long investigation of the goddess. The story detailed the explicit warnings the Getty had received about the statue before buying it—from archaeologists, Italian officials, even the director of the Getty Conservation Institute, all of whom had said the statue was almost certainly looted. The article also took apart the cover story of the statue's former owner, Canavesi, revealing that his relatives had never heard of the seven-and-a-half-foot, one-ton statue, which had supposedly been sitting in their basement for nearly fifty years. Finally, the article cited two Sicilians with ties to the illicit trade who claimed to have seen parts of the statue not far from Morgantina in 1979, when it was rumored to have been illegally excavated there.

  The Getty's stance had clearly emboldened other museums. Susan Taylor, head of the Princeton University Art Museum, told the audience that her museum was moving toward a bright-line policy, too. She was scheduled to fly to Rome in three days for her own talks about three artifacts in Princeton's collection that were implicated in the Medici files.

  The third speaker, Timothy Rub of the Cleveland Museum of Art, addressed speculation that the Italians would be coming after the museum's statue of Apollo, thought to have been created by Praxiteles, one of ancient Greece's greatest sculptors. He made it clear that he saw the same kind of policy changes coming at the Cleveland, and expressed his doubts about the future acquisition of antiquities.

  Sensing an opportunity, Max Anderson stood up in the audience when the panelists were done. Anderson was new at the Indianapolis Museum of Art but a veteran of the cultural patrimony debate, having served as assistant curator to von Bothmer at the Met and briefly adviser to the Fleischmans as they built their ill-fated collection. Having unsuccessfully pushed for bright-line reform in the past, he was now leading the fight again. "I appreciate the candor of my colleagues, and I think the time has come to draw a bright line," said Anderson. "Now's the time to do it. We should reopen the guidelines."

  The challenge triggered a lively debate. James Cuno of the Art Institute of Chicago jumped up. A member of the old guard and an outspoken collecting hawk, he was spoiling for a fight. No bright-line policy in America was going to stop the looting in Italy, he argued. The Italians had every right to make their patrimony laws, but they and other source countries had made archaeology the handmaiden of nationalism. Antiquities were best served by museums, not politics.

  John R. Lane, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, made the collector's case more brusquely, and perhaps more honestly. "Maybe I'm out of step, but I'm an old museum guy, and I want to buy what I want to buy," he said. Given the recent headlines, the idea seemed so hopelessly out of sync that some people chuckled under their breath.

  Peter Morrin, director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, weighed in next. You can make all the philosophical arguments you want about the value of universal museums, but you can't ignore the courts or public opinion, he said. The conviction of Frederick Schultz, the trial of Marion True, and the campaign by the Italians had changed everything.

  The most telling sign that the times had changed came from Anne d'Harnoncourt, the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She had stood solidly behind de Montebello in the past but now rose to call the ten-year rule "weaselly." She quickly regretted using the word, but it was too late.

  The young reformers were clearly with the majority. It was only a matter of time before the association would jettison its ten-year rule and adopt the 1970 cut-off date first established by the UNESCO Convention some three decades earlier.

  AS BREEZY AS Brand had been about the Aphrodite's origins in front of his fellow museum directors, one final task remained for him to convince the Getty board of trustees to return the statue that had come to symbolize the museum's antiquities woes.

  In April 2007, Jerry Podany, chief of antiquities conservation at the Getty Museum, found himself on an airplane to perform what, in his line of work, was tantamount to identifying the mortal remains of a loved one. Of all the assignments he'd had over the years—appraising artifacts in Swiss bank vaults, sizing up statues in warehouses, eyeing vase fragments in dealers' display cases, examining microscopic fossils to determine a statue's authenticity—this would probably be the easiest. Yet it also had to be one of the weightier.

  Podany was heading to Lugano to meet with Renzo Canavesi and confirm that his photos were, indeed, of the Getty's Aphrodite. The decision had already been made to give the statue back, but Brand wanted Podany to take one more look, just to make sure Canavesi's photos were of the same piece now towering in the Getty Villa. Luis Li, already in Europe on a vacation, arranged to accompany the conservator. Li had his assignment, too. He hoped to talk Canavesi into giving up at least a few of his photos for safekeeping at the Getty.

  The whole thing came off like something out of John le Carré. On April 27, Podany and Li were met by Canavesi's attorney at a nondescript building in central Lugano. They were led to another anonymous office building and up to a sterile room. Waiting there was Canavesi. After shaking hands with his guests, the former tobacco shop owner matter-of-factly led them to a table where twenty photos were lying face-down.

  Podany thought that maybe Canavesi wanted payment of some kind. But soon the photos were flipped over, and Podany trained his expert eyes on specific details—a fold, a break, a uniquely shaped crack—that matched his memory of the statue he had meticulously conserved for the past two decades. There was no doubt it was the Aphrodite.

  The photos were devastating: they showed the statue in dozens of pieces on the floor of what appeared to be a basement. In one, some thirty fragments of the goddess lay scattered in dirt on a brown tile floor. At the top of the photograph, pieces of varying sizes were lined up in rows on a large, thick plastic sheet. Another photo showed the statue's marble face still encrusted with dirt. Like
the Polaroids seized from Medici's warehouse, these photos all but screamed that the Aphrodite had been looted.

  After twenty minutes, Podany excused himself. He took a very long walk along Lugano's steeply sloping streets, passing quaint shops, the city hall with its Spanish tile roof, and the modern offices of Credit Suisse and Banca Unione di Credito. He walked through the Piazza Dante Alighieri, passed the front door of the cathedral, and continued out into the harbor of Lake Lugano, a blue jewel framed by mountains in the background.

  Podany ran through the photographs in his mind, digesting what he had seen. He thought about the Aphrodite as Marion True's signature piece and the cruel irony that someone who had campaigned to change the buying habits of reluctant American museums had become a symbol of curatorial greed. And he thought about how all of it might have been prevented if True had seen these photos before the Getty bought the goddess.

  When he returned to California, Podany wrote a brief memo to Brand confirming that the photos were of the Aphrodite. "Had I seen these photographs earlier," he told Brand, "I don't think we would be down this path."

  AFTER EIGHT MONTHS of stubborn silence, broken only by a salvo of op-ed pieces from both sides in the Wall Street Journal, the Getty and Italy finally ended their standoff.

  The deadlock had appeared unbreakable. The Getty had drawn the line at returning the Getty Bronze, whose discovery by Itali an fishermen in international waters muddied any moral case for its return. But Italy could not give up on the bronze without losing face. As an additional incentive to the Getty, the Culture Ministry had been slowly strangling the museum with a de facto cultural embargo. Loans of Itali an art and any cooperation with Itali an museums had slowly ground to a halt. In July, Rutelli traveled to Fano, where the statue was still legendary among the village's hardscrabble fishermen. Thumbing for dramatic effect a list of dozens of other Getty objects that Italy would demand if the museum didn't restart talks, the culture minister threatened to make the embargo official on August 1. As Rutelli's threatened deadline approached, the museum showed no signs of budging on the bronze.

  The breakthrough came thanks to Maurizio Fiorilli. The state attorney had secretly engineered a cl ever way to restart negotiations with everyone saving face. Seeing that Rutelli was in danger of appearing toothless, Fiorilli quietly drafted a new legal complaint asking a regional court for a new investigation into the bronze. A group of cultural activists from Fano filed the complaint under their own names, with the agreement that Fiorilli's role would remain secret. The ruse had the desired effect—the complaint led to a new criminal investigation, providing the Culture Ministry with a convenient way to back away from its immediate demands. Soon after, Rutelli sent a private fax to Brand. Given the pending judicial investigation, he explained, Italy had little choice but to withdraw its request for the Getty Bronze for the time being. It could always be reinstated later, of course, depending on what the court found.

  With the bronze off the table, the deadlock was broken. After a flurry of faxes just hours before the August 1 deadline, a deal was announced: of the forty-six artifacts that Italy was now demanding, the Getty would return forty, including the Aphrodite. The objects had been purchased over thirty years for nearly $40 million, and their current value was many times that. The Getty would receive no compensation for the loss, but the Culture Ministry offered to loan the Getty objects comparable to those being returned. It was to be the beginning of a new era of cultural cooperation, both sides proclaimed.

  After nearly ten years of denial, double talk, rationalizations, stonewalling, finger-pointing, handwringing, second-guessing, defiance, and, finally, resignation, the Getty's antiquities nightmare was over.

  ***

  AT THE GETTY, it was as if a cloud had lifted. The Italian negotiations had left the Getty stuck in a limbo of perpetual crisis. Now the rebuilding could begin.

  Months earlier, California attorney general Bill Lockyer had completed his investigation into Barry Munitz's excesses. It proved to be little more than a pro forma review confirming what had already been published in the newspapers. In the end, Lockyer concluded that his friend Munitz and the Getty board had misused the trust's resources for their own benefit. But the attorney general stopped short of imposing any penalties. Instead, his office appointed a monitor to make sure that the trust implemented a broad slate of reforms.

  The Getty was already well on the road to reform. In the two years since Munitz had been forced out, virtually all of the trust's seni or leadership had left, as well as many of Munitz's handpicked trustees. New faces were everywhere.

  James Wood, the well-respected former director of the Art Institute of Chicago—and someone who had attended the Met's secret summit of museum directors in April 2002—was coaxed out of retirement to provide a steady hand as CEO.

  Brand was filling vacancies in the museum's leadership with capable, qualified people. In the antiquities department, True's deputy, Karol Wight, was joined by Claire Lyons, an outspoken archaeologist from the Research Institute. With few antiquities available for purchase under the strict new policy, staff members could devote their energies to scholarship and collaborative efforts with foreign countries.

  The cloud, however, had not lifted from Marion True. Friends said that she was depressed. She spent her time remodeling her kitchen in France and following the tortured legal proceedings in Italy.

  Shortly after the Getty inked its agreement with Italy, Fiorilli dropped the Culture Ministry's civil claims against all but three of the artifacts cited as evidence against True in the criminal case. The criminal case continued to grind on, with a hearing every few months. Its outcome was largely irrelevant. Ferri told the press that he had no interest in putting the platinum-haired curator in jail. His goal had been to change the behavior of American museums, and that battle had been won. Marion True had been collateral damage, a means to an end, Ferri admitted. He continued to offer a speedy conclusion to the criminal trial in exchange for some acknowledgment of her role in the illicit trade, a deal True's attorneys continued to reject.

  The Greek criminal case reached a similarly uneventful conclusion. In November 2007, the court agreed to drop all charges after True's attorney argued that the statute of limitations had expired.

  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."

  ITALY, MEANWHILE, CONTINUED to wring concessions from other American museums.

  In October 2007, Princeton Unive
rsity 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.