[Debate]The Euphronios vase back to Italy! (pics inside)
Stolen Beauty: A Greek Urn’s Underworld
The Euphronios vase, once the centerpiece of the Metropolitan Museum’s ancient-vase collection, at the Villa Giulia in Rome
CERVETERI, Italy — Italy’s biggest prize in the war against looting antiquities went on view recently at the Villa Giulia in Rome.
The prize is the notorious, magnificent sixth-century B.C. red-figure krater by the Greek artist Euphronios, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art lately returned: the “hot pot,” as Thomas Hoving, the former Met director who bought it in 1972, mischievously took to calling it. A show of recovered spoils at the Quirinale in Rome last year became the pot’s homecoming party, after which it was rushed, like a freshly anointed Miss Italy, off to an exhibition in Mantua, appropriately enough about beauty.
Now it’s ensconced at the villa, its new permanent home, in a bulky glass case with odd little Christmas lights. Maybe overexposure explains why this didn’t strike Italians as particularly big news. The media mostly gave the event a pass. The gallery was empty the other afternoon.
A new book may help revive interest. “The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece,” just published by William Morrow, makes a first-class page turner out of the stolen krater’s travels from ancient Greece to Etruscan Italy to New York and then back here — and of the travails of another work also by the sublime Euphronios, a kylix, or chalice, which was looted from the same spot here in Cerveteri, a town northwest of Rome.
Vernon Silver, a 40-year-old American journalist and a doctoral student in archaeology at Oxford, wrote the book. “This is the whole illicit antiquities trade writ small,” he said a few days ago. “The two works started out in the hands of the same Greek artist, 2,500 years ago, ended up going through the same shady Italian dealer by different routes to America, one the public route, the other underground, and both end up back here in Italy.”
The tale is one neither Met officials nor Italian authorities will be pleased to find so conscientiously recounted. It turns out that balls were dropped and that plenty of other shenanigans transpired on both sides, even before the Met (obviously without trying too hard to check the facts) paid $1 million, an unprecedented sum at that time, for what was the finest example of painted pottery by the greatest known vase painter of ancient Greece. The museum’s story was that the krater, illustrating the Homeric tale of the death of Sarpedon, Zeus’ son, belonged to a Lebanese collector. But rumors instantly started circulating that the pot had been looted. Italian police began hunting for evidence in Cerveteri, the former Etruscan city of Caere, known for its ancient tombs. (Etruscans collected Euphronios the way that Gilded Age Americans collected Rembrandt.) Not coincidentally, modern-day Cerveteri is famous for its tomb robbers.
Mr. Silver returned one sweltering day last month to the patch of countryside on the edge of town where, late in 1971, a lookout watched while five tombaroli, as tomb robbers are called here, stuck poles into the wet earth until they struck something underground. They tunneled some 15 feet down and came upon a complex of ancient burial chambers. They knew they had hit pay dirt when they unearthed painted pottery, broken but (all things considered) mostly in tip-top condition.
The man who bought the loot from them later passed it along to a restorer in Switzerland, who repaired the pots before they were sent on to a dealer, who in turn approached the Met. It wasn’t until reading in the newspapers, months later, how much the museum had actually paid for the Euphronios krater that the robbers realized that they had themselves been bamboozled.
The site today is thick with prickly brush, yellow broom and purple malva, a picturesque ruin, scented by wild mint and fennel. It isn’t hard to figure out why the robbers looked here. Local superstition had it that the place was haunted by a demon, so tombaroli steered clear for eons. Looting-wise, it was virgin territory.
“This is also a place where you find things just lying around in plain sight,” Mr. Silver said. “So it was obvious that something might turn up.” At that moment, resting in the dirt near Mr. Silver’s foot, was a shard of ancient pottery with traces of paint still on it. A second piece lay beside it.
The demon ended up being an ancient sculpture of a gnarly monster, buried along with other stone sculptures. To cover their tracks, the looters filled in the tunnels, after which hasty Italian investigators bulldozed the grounds in a curious rush to uncover the ransacked tombs. It became impossible after that to reconstruct how the works had lain when the tombaroli found them.
“Had someone properly excavated the site,” Mr. Silver said, “we could have learned so much more about the Etruscans.”
But the looters did bring to light the krater, which millions of people then saw at the Met, where for decades it was the centerpiece of the ancient-vase collection. Much of what Italian authorities fished out of the ground afterward, lesser finds, ended up in Cerveteri’s small archaeology museum, which even now keeps strangely mute about the looting.
The silence is even more striking at the Villa Giulia, where not a word about Cerveteri accompanies the newly installed krater. Museum authorities insist that the arrangement is temporary. They say the work will move to a display of artifacts from Cerveteri that they’re preparing in the villa.
Meanwhile, the krater is divorced from the spot where the looters discovered it, not to mention from its Greek origin. A Greek pot sold to an Etruscan buyer and stolen from an Italian site and ending up in New York, it has become a Greek pot in a Roman museum dedicated to Etruscan art, displayed now alongside other artifacts recovered from American museums with labels identifying not the archaeological legacy of these objects but the institutions that gave them back. What matters to the Italians, it would seem, is not simply straightening out the archaeological record. It’s also providing cautionary tales for prospective collectors in the illegal antiquities trade via trophies like the krater.
The Etruscan burial ground of Greppe Sant’Angelo where the Krater of Euphronius was found.
As for the kylix that Mr. Silver also writes about, it shattered a few years ago when dropped by a Swiss policeman after a raid on the Geneva warehouse belonging to Giacomo Medici, the Roman middleman who bought the hot pots from the looters and passed them along to Robert Hecht, the American dealer who sold the krater to the Met. Today the kylix remains in pieces behind locked doors in a fake Etruscan temple on the grounds of the Villa Giulia. Occasionally, a visitor will try to peer through the keyhole, oblivious to what’s inside.
If any doubts remain about whether the Euphronioses were really looted, by the way, Francesco Bartocci is still around. So far as he knows, he’s the last survivor among the tombaroli. He acted as the lookout. A farmer by trade, now 70, he lives in a modest house in Cerveteri. He was standing on his patio in sandals, T-shirt and baggy trousers when his wife emerged from the cellar, lugging a pitcher of homemade olive oil and a plastic bag full of broken pieces of ancient pottery that she explained had turned up when the patio had recently been repaired.
“They’re everywhere,” she said about the potsherds, before asking if Mr. Silver might wish to take the bag off her hands. (No thanks, he said.)
“They stole a whole lot of money from me,” Mr. Bartocci declared when asked about Mr. Medici (not a relative of the aristocrats, if you were wondering) and Mr. Hecht. “But what was I supposed to do? I was a thief like they were.”
He shrugged. The job was his only stint as a looter, he wanted to make clear: “I’m a farmer, not a tombarolo, but I had a truck, a three-wheeler, which they needed because there was so much stuff to cart away.”
In this region where looting has long been an open profession, and where there’s even a store selling reproductions of ancient pots cheekily called the Metropolitan Museo, Mr. Bartocci is hardly ashamed of what he did.
“I’m proud,” he said. “I’m sorry the vase went to America and that I didn’t make more money.” He laughed. “But I’m honored to be associated with something so great.”
And now he’s glad to hear the Euphronios is back in Italy.
“But not in Cerveteri,” he added. “We don’t have an adequate museum here. It would be too dangerous. Somebody might steal it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/ar...&_r=1&ref=arts
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Originally Posted by SigniferOne
again... are these examples of shading?
