Raiders of the lost art
SINCE LAST November, two well-heeled Americans have been on trial in Rome. Marion True, a former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Robert E. Hecht Jr., an American art dealer living in Paris, are facing charges of conspiring to bring looted and smuggled antiquities out of Italy and into the United States.
During that time, and well before any judgment will be reached, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has begun returning looted objects to Italian ownership, and the Getty is negotiating similar action.
Some museum professionals are complaining that the Italians (not to mention the Greeks) have suddenly become very aggressive in pursuit of what they see as their property, and are using the trial -- and the threat of more to come -- as leverage to pry objects out of (mainly American) museums.
But if the Italians are aggressive, it is only because they now have evidence in abundance to prove what many archeologists have been arguing for more than 30 years: The vast majority of classical antiquities that are sold at auction at Bonhams, Christie's and Sotheby's; that make up most of the collections formed in the U.S. and elsewhere since World War II; that grace the world's major museums; and that are traded on Madison Avenue, Bond Street and Quai Voltaire, are smuggled loot.
The True/Hecht trial is the culmination of events that began with a raid on Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici's warehouse in Geneva in 1995. That, combined with documents from Sotheby's, resulted in his conviction in December 2004, a prison sentence of 10 years and a fine of $12 million, though he is free pending his appeal.
Four thousand objects were seized in just this one warehouse, together with 35,000 documents and 3,600 photographs relating to 7,000 antiquities in all. Based on this evidence, Italian experts calculated that 50 important tombs had been looted. By comparison, a successful archeologist can expect to find two important tombs in an entire career.
In the course of the looting, some of the damage done by the tombaroli, or tomb robbers, was shocking. Entire walls taken from a villa near Pompeii were found in the warehouse. Color photographs seized in the raid proved that these walls had been hacked to pieces -- reduced to laptop-size chunks -- for ease of smuggling.
