Review Article: The Illicit Antiquities Scandal: What It Has Done to Classical Archaeology Collections

We can expect a book with revelations of this kind to prompt a strong reaction from the powerful in the acquiring museums, with talk of world heritage and cosmopolitan culture. They may particularly grumble in feeling that U.S. museums are now being targeted by the more prosperous countries of origin seeking to recover what was taken (while poorer countries of origin such as Albania may not have the resources to pursue this route effectively). There are at least two reasons why they might be targeted—if indeed they are. One is admirable: U.S. laws and their enforcement by U.S. courts are such that wrongdoing can be revealed, proven, and reversed in a way that may be hard in other jurisdictions. One is not admirable: the common close nexus in the United States of museums holding charitable privileges with energetic private collectors who are also patrons and benefactors, the two interests working together with the celebratory curators, attributors, and identifiers—a kind of partnership that has long seemed so productive in taking ambitious U.S. museums forward—may come to be seen as having a darker side that makes it a mixed, even a cursed blessing. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states; if a sovereign nation-state resolves that its patrimony should not cross its frontiers, then cosmopolitans in other lands should respect that sovereign decision rather than imagine they have some cultured right of access to the stuff. Decades, often many decades, ago nearly all the countries where classical antiquities are to be found passed protective legislation to ensure they were no longer legally exported. Accordingly, it would be expected, the free market in other lands for classical objects should by now be nearly completely restricted to “recycling” objects from the old collections that had left their lands of origin before the bar came down. That has not happened: the great U.S. museums, old and new, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, have continued to acquire and present classical objects new to the world, such as the Getty’s great and perfect kouros and the Metropolitan’s Euphronios krater, as astonishing and splendid as those masterpieces such as the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, which came out in the previous era.1 So, what has been going on? There have been occasional glimpses all is not well: a wonderful Egyptian sculpture is given a knock as it is transported from the London to the New York premises of one of the world’s great auction houses, and its ancient “stone” disintegrates into a modern mess of wood shavings and plaster; one or another great museum, under lawyers’ pressure from Italy or Greece or Turkey, reluctantly returns some masterpiece while avoiding any admission of criminality or guilt. Italian full-time professional tomb robbers publish their memoirs, prompting again the question, “What happens to their loot once they have sold it?” Thomas Hoving, ever the mischievous and charismatic one-time director of the Metropolitan Museum, has often made it clear he enjoyed its world of careering games; he called its Euphronios krater the “hot pot” not only because it was the most expensive Greek vase in history.2 It happens that a number of criminal investigations and subsequent trials have recently revealed and documented the workings of this hidden world. Behind the neatly trimmed cuts in a chic butchers’ shop window, in which all evidence of blood that might upset the squeamish has been drained, is the stinking and knifing violence of the slaughterhouse floor; behind the elegance of these wonderful new finds is a dirty and wicked world of theft and criminality. This excellent book reveals that world; it is vivid, lively, eye-opening, often very comic—and deeply, deeply dispiriting. In its 21 breathless chapters, the reader is given a range of scenarios that even John Grisham would struggle to fit within a single thriller: heists in museums, nighttime looting in Tuscan olive groves, police raids in the Geneva Freeport, mysterious deaths in the cellar, phone taps, hidden laboratories, religious cults in Japan. Sleaze and hypocrisy ooze from the characters who flit through these shadowy worlds—from the flashy antiquities galleries in Switzerland to the flattering salons where the world’s “great museums” entertain their generous patrons and benefactors. Our own experience of life in its many aspects inclines us generally to prefer cock-up theories of history; sequences of events in large part arise from chance, confusion, chaos, coincidence. But Watson and Todeschini rightly call their book the Medici conspiracy because the world in which Gia