Chasing Aphrodite (13 page)

After the men placed their orders, Walsh pulled a paper from his jacket pocket and rattled off the policy's bullet points. As Monreal listened, he felt his face grow hotter and hotter. Who was Walsh trying to fool? Everyone knew that source countries such as Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus didn't have the manpower or technology to keep up with the rampant looting. Asking them to provide proof that an object had been looted was an empty exercise, a flimsy attempt to make it look as though the museum was acting morally. And Monreal was sure that Walsh felt that way, too.

"John, let me look at it. I want to think about it," Monreal said.

Walsh refused to give up the paper.

"John, this policy is at a minimum unreasonable and at a maximum cynical and deceptive. It's just window dressing to allow you to keep buying from this illicit market. You're putting the Getty on a road to future disaster with foreign governments and public opinion."

"Well, Luis, you don't see it clearly," Walsh said softly. "I've studied these things properly, and this is the result of a major effort and lots of consultations."

Walsh apparently wanted to be able to say that he had consulted Monreal, but he didn't really want to hear what Monreal thought.

"John, I think we have nothing else to talk about."

Back at his office, Monreal called Williams to register his protest. The Getty chief said that he was fully behind Walsh. They presented the new antiquities acquisition policy to the board on November 13. It was approved, with Monreal sitting silently nearby. Neither Williams nor Walsh indicated to the trustees that there had been any opposition.

A week later, the Getty's Italian lawyers received an answer to their inquiry about the Aphrodite. The Italian Ministry of Culture had no information about the statue.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER,
the 1,300-pound Aphrodite was put into two crates and loaded onto a Pan American flight from London's Heathrow Airport to Los Angeles International. The customs form listed its country of origin as Great Britain. Its insurance value was $20 million. Upon their arrival in Los Angeles, the crates were immediately hauled to the Getty's conservation laboratory, where they were carefully unpacked.

Symes had loaned the Aphrodite to the Getty for a year of study, but there was little doubt what would happen next. The statue soon began drawing crowds of curiosity seekers from among the Getty staff and board members. Many who came to see it were in awe. It was the kind of acquisition that could put the Getty on the map.

Monreal was among those who made the pilgrimage to see the goddess. Walking into the museum's conservation lab, he spent twenty minutes studying the clay-filled folds of the flowing gown, the sharp edges of the breaks through the torso. The surfaces of the breaks were clean, showing no sign of the calcite rind that covered the outer surfaces. They were recent. Monreal figured that the looters had broken the statue with a large object, using a piece of wood to blunt the impact.

As he left the lab, he bumped into a colleague in the hall. "Have you seen the Aphrodite?" the man asked, excited.

"Yes," Monreal answered darkly. "How could the museum even consider buying this thing?"

"But it's fantastic!"

"Are you kidding? This thing is a hot, hot potato."

Word of Monreal's public criticism reached Walsh even before the conservation director had time to get back to his office and call him. "John, it's downright irresponsible to consider this piece for acquisition," Monreal said angrily. He offered to have his staff analyze the dirt in the statue's folds. If it contained pollen, it might help pinpoint where the statue had been dug up, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct something of its context.

Walsh ruled out a pollen test. "Luis, we've done everything necessary to make sure the statue wasn't illicit."

Rebuffed, Monreal went over Walsh's head, bringing up the issue with Williams. He asked the CEO not to go forward with the acquisition unless the tests were done. "Harold, it's not a good idea for the Getty to buy this piece. It has all the signs of being illegally traded and recently excavated, and this could be a delayed time bomb ... This isn't the kind of piece you want to be playing with."

Williams was unmoved. With the new policy on the books, the CEO closed ranks with his museum director. He considered Monreal an alarmist and believed that the museum was taking all the appropriate precautions.

O
N MAY
11, 1988, True submitted her formal nine-page acquisition proposal for the statue to the full board. She wrote:

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the proposed statue for this museum or, indeed, for any other collection in the world. It surpasses even the kouros and the bronze Victorious Athlete in rarity and importance. Original stone sculpture of the fifth century BC came to be considered the acme of human artistic achievement by the Romans under the Empire, the Italians of the Renaissance, and every succeeding western society in various phases of Classical revival.

What set the sculpture apart, and confirmed its creation in the fifth century B.c., was the goddess's intricate windblown dress, a technique first developed by Phidias, the greatest Greek master of the high classical period. He used it when supervising the creation of the Parthenon's east pediment, a scene that depicts the birth of Athena. The goddesses gathered around her wear damp, diaphanous gowns that readily reveal their naked bodies underneath. The "wet drapery" style swept through Greek civilization and was imitated by sculptors in the Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy, where the Aphrodite was likely created.

"Such sensitivity is never completely understood or recaptured by later sculptures ... She is the perfect embodiment of the greatest achievements of Greek sculptors of the 5th century BC," True wrote. Indeed, her only peers were the Parthenon marbles that Lord Elgin took from the Acropolis and that now resided in the British Museum.

True continued:

The proposed statue of Aphrodite would not only become the single greatest piece of ancient art in our collection; it would be the greatest piece of Classical sculpture in this country and any country outside of Greece and Great Britain. In our effort to assemble a collection of objects of the highest artistic quality and importance, we will find no finer piece of sculpture to represent the accomplishments of the Greek artists of the fifth century BC, the culmination of two centuries of artistic and intellectual development that would become the standard against which all later European art would have [to] be measured.

The statue's price had been negotiated down to $18 million—nearly twice what the Getty had paid for the kouros. The Aphrodite was worth it, True argued.

T
HREE THOUSAND MILES
away, the phone rang at
Connoisseur
magazine in New York. Thomas Hoving answered. On the other end was one very upset antiquities dealer. Would Hoving be interested in an even bigger story than the Jiri Frel tax scam or the fake kouros?

A top Sicilian smuggler had offered him a large limestone statue two and a half years ago for $2 million, the dealer said. The smuggler had said that the statue had been found in Morgantina, Sicily, in 1979, and had already been turned down by a private collector and dealers in Paris, Switzerland, and New York. The dealer told Hoving that he had turned it down because it was "too hot." Now the Getty was going to buy it, and the dealer was steamed: the Getty had put a purchase from him on hold because it needed the money for the statue. The dealer told Hoving that True had bragged that the Getty had "pulled the wool over the eyes of the Italians" by sending them photos of the object but not revealing who was going to buy it.

Hoving hung up, delighted. He would have another shot at the Getty. He asked his reporter in Europe to call the Getty and ask for a comment on what they had learned. The call came a week before the trustees were scheduled to take their final vote on the Aphrodite purchase and sent True scrambling again.

T
HE BRIGHT YELLOW
DHL van carrying photos of the Aphrodite looked out of place as it jostled down the winding, potholed road to the ruins of the ancient Greek city-state of Morgantina, which sits much as it did twenty-five hundred years ago, surrounded by olive and wheat fields atop a promontory in central Sicily.

Watching the van with bemused curiosity was Malcolm Bell. The wiry, bespectacled University of Virginia archaeologist was standing knee-deep in a trench, wearing his signature floppy hat. Bell had been digging at Morgantina on and off since 1967, his final year as a Princeton graduate student. A decade before his arrival, a team of Princeton archaeologists had discovered the site when a graduate student dug up a coin stamped with the word
Hispanorum,
Latin for "of Spain." Looking back through the ancient sources, the student found that the only time Spaniards were linked to the region was in the chronicles of Livy, the Roman historian, who wrote that the Greek city-state of Morgantina had been given to Spanish mercenaries when it was conquered by Rome in 210
B.C.
The storied center of wealth and fertility had finally been found.

Morgantina was laid out in typical Greek fashion: a neat grid of streets radiating from a central agora, a large square that served as the political and economic heart of the city. Morgantina's agora was the largest in the ancient world, covering six city blocks and lined on three sides by long stoas, two-story covered colonnades that held shops, government offices, and a public bank. At its peak, the city supported some ten thousand people, mostly families that each owned a plot of land. It was an egalitarian society that reached its apex just as the Roman army rolled through western Sicily. Soon after, Morgantina's residents were driven out. Nearly 250 years after its founding, one of Greek civilization's most glorious outposts was abandoned.

Morgantina's ill fortune proved a boon to the Princeton archaeologists. Excavations uncovered signs of a dedicated cult following of Demeter and Persephone, the mother-daughter goddesses of fertility. The story of Persephone's abduction by Hades, god of the underworld, was the Greek explanation for the changing of the seasons. After the beautiful young woman disappeared while gathering wildflowers along the shores of Lake Pergusa, Demeter searched the earth for her, in vain, carrying an outstretched torch to light her way. Eventually, Demeter learned of the abduction and threatened to leave humankind in a perpetual winter if her daughter was not returned. Zeus brokered a deal that let Persephone out of the underworld to be with her mother for nine months every year—the harvest cycle of spring, summer, and fall. For the three months of winter, Persephone had to return to Hades, leaving the fields barren.

As the breadbasket of southern Europe, central Sicily had a strong link to this fertility myth. Indeed, Morgantina was a short walk from Lake Pergusa. In the late 1970s, Princeton archaeologists unearthed a complex of twenty small temples used for centuries to worship the goddesses. Nestled along a steep hillside thick with orchards of figs and pomegranate trees, the temple complex contained dozens of terra-cotta busts of Persephone and Demeter.

If Morgantina's discovery was a boon for archaeologists, it proved a bonanza for local looters. After the excavators returned home from a summer of digging, the site fell prey to looters from the nearby hill town of Aidone. Bell did what he could to fend them off, hiring guards to watch the site during the winter months. But the tomb robbers, or
tombaroli
as they were known locally, proved tenacious competitors for the relics of the ancient city. Bell once returned to the ruins after Sunday supper and stumbled upon a group of men hastily emptying a tomb of some 350 objects. Among the men was Giuseppe Mascara, the well-known boss of local looters. Mascara and his men were arrested by the Carabinieri, the national police, but soon released. The next time Bell caught the looter, he was prowling the ruins with a metal detector. Bell chased him over the city wall and into a bramble patch.

For his vigilance, Bell suffered some strange mishaps. He discovered two nails pounded into the tire of his Volkswagen Beetle. A Bunsen burner in his lab was found leaking gas, its line severed. When someone smashed his windshield, Bell realized that the Mafia was sending him a message: if he wanted to stay in Sicily, he would have to learn to live with them. Bell accepted an awkward coexistence with his archaeological enemies, who ransacked Morgantina much like the Spanish mercenaries had done nearly two millennia before.

By 1988, when the DHL truck wound down the road to Morgantina bearing a package from Marion True, Bell had all but given up the fight.

A
FEW DAYS
earlier, Bell had received a hasty phone call from the Getty antiquities curator asking if he knew anything about the discovery of a limestone statue of a goddess at Morgantina. True promised to mail him several black-and-white photos of the statue.

Now opening the yellow pouch, Bell found the photos and a brief note. "Recently a rumor has reached us that the object may have come from Aidone or Morgantina," True wrote, referring to Hoving's inquiry. "Although we do not wish to be at the mercy of every journalist's unfounded attack, we also do not wish to pursue the acquisition in obvious disregard for the laws of Italy."

Looking at the photos, it was hard for Bell to imagine that such a large and important piece could have been found at Morgantina without his having heard about it. But he couldn't rule it out. In a nearby museum was a similar limestone statue of a woman that archaeologists had found in the city's agora in 1956, although that statue was likely 150 years later than the one in the photographs.

Bell believed that a cult statue the size of the Getty's Aphrodite would have been housed in a large temple, but in thirty years of excavation at Morgantina, no one had found such a shrine. If it was truly Aphrodite, as True suggested, that was additional evidence against a Morgantina provenance. There was little evidence of the ancient worship of the love goddess there. Looking closely at the photos, Bell thought that True's identification of the statue might be wrong. It appeared that the Getty's goddess had worn a veil, suggesting a more matronly figure than Aphrodite. Perhaps it was Hera, Zeus's wife—or Persephone, which might very well point back to Morgantina. Without the statue's headdress or any indication of what the figure's outstretched hand once held, it was impossible to tell.