Stealing History
Cultural treasures are being looted--and museums and collectors are turning a blind eye
Rightful home. Already, legal and public pressures are having an effect. The Getty has returned to Italy three suspect items and is discussing with Italy and Greece the fate of several others. The Met has agreed to return to Italy 21 artifacts--including the Euphronios krater--in exchange for long-term loans of other valuable items. "We're in the queer situation where the museums are returning everything, which in a sense means they accept it's looted," says Watson, coauthor of The Medici Conspiracy, excerpted in this issue. As foreign authorities continue their probes, many more repatriations are likely.
Tomb raiders can do irreparable damage to archaeologically significant sites, robbing them of not only their art but their context. "There's been an immense loss of knowledge," says Chippindale, "because a lot of archaeological information comes not from the object but where it was found." The nighttime excavations of the tombaroli are indeed crude: One enterprising Swiss dealer gave raiders chain saws to more quickly cut out frescoes. Collectors and curators argue that buying unprovenanced antiquities preserves many objects that would otherwise be lost forever. But Kathryn Tubb, an archaeologist at University College London, argues: "It's still handling stolen material. All the other arguments may have some validity, but they don't get over that fact." Legitimate buyers also create a huge black market for the tombaroli. Estimates on the size of the trade vary from $100 million to $4 billion annually.
To be sure, curators and collectors have always expressed a willingness to return looted treasures. But therein lies the rub, because the burden of proof rests with the country of origin. "The problem was a complete absence of concrete evidence," explains Tubb. How could countries provide tangible proof of ownership of items looted and smuggled? "Archaeologists always knew what was going on," Tubb adds, and she thinks the museums did, too. "There's been a great element of hubris; they never thought they'd be exposed."
Exposure finally came, in spades, in 1995 when luck and dogged detective work combined to lead the Italian police to a warehouse in Geneva operated by the antiquities trader Giacomo Medici. Inside, authorities found a veritable Aladdin's cave of loot, ranging from marbles and bronzes to frescoes and vases. More important, they uncovered thousands of documents and photos, many of them showing items now in collections when they were still encrusted in dirt.
Suddenly, there was an abundance of a commodity once in short supply: evidence. It took authorities a decade to sift through it, but the results have been impressive. Medici was convicted last year on multiple charges, including the illegal export of looted antiquities. Meanwhile, Gianfranco Becchina, an Italian rival of Medici, is expected to go on trial next year, says Paolo Ferri, the Italian prosecutor handling the cases. Last September, police discovered and raided another Becchina warehouse and uncovered a huge cache of documents they're still examining. And in April, Greek police raided two villas containing 142 artifacts in an operation they say is connected to the True case.
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