Chasing Aphrodite (2 page)

Over four decades, the Getty chased many illicit masterpieces—a bronze athlete, a towering marble youth, a sculpture of savage griffins, a golden funerary wreath. One of those acquisitions—the museum's iconic seven-and-a-half-foot statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love—would become a totem for the beguiling beauty of ancient art.

The goddess held an allure so strong that a museum risked everything to own her; a nation rose up to demand her return; archaeologists, private investigators, and journalists scoured the globe for her origins; and a curator ruined herself trying to keep her.

This book is the story of that chase, an unprecedented inside account of how the world's richest museum was forced to confront its buried past and, in doing so, brought about an epochal change in the history of collecting art.

I
N THE PREDAWN LIGHT
of a summer morning in 1964, the sixty-foot fishing trawler
Ferrucio Ferri
shoved off from the Italian seaport of Fano and motored south, making a steady eight knots along Italy's east coast. When the
Ferri
reached the peninsula of Ancona, Romeo Pirani, the boat's captain, set a course east-southeast, halfway between the dry sirocco wind that blew up from Africa and the cooler levanter that swept across the Adriatic from Yugoslavia.

The six-man crew dozed. The sea was glassy, but Pirani knew how temperamental the Adriatic could be at this time of year. Just a few weeks earlier, a sudden storm had blown across the sea, sinking three boats and killing four fishermen. Weather was not his only worry. The Second World War had left its mark on the sea and made his job all the more dangerous. Nets hauled up mines and bombs left behind decades before by retreating Nazi forces or their American pursuers. The arms of many men in Fano bore scars from the acid that oozed out of the rusting ordnance.

As the sun rose, blinding their eyes, Pirani and his crew sipped
moretta,
a hot mixture of rum, brandy, espresso, and anise, topped with a lemon rind and lots of sugar. The strong brew gave the men not just warmth but courage. By nightfall, the
Ferri
had reached its destination, a spot in international waters roughly midway between Italy and Yugoslavia. The captain knew of a rocky outcropping that rose from the seabed where octopuses and schools of
merluza
and St. Peter's fish gathered for safety in the summer heat. Other boats ventured farther east, into the deep waters off the Yugoslav coast, where they risked arrest for poaching. But Pirani preferred this hidden shoal. Although fishing there meant occasionally snagging the nets on sharp rocks, the boat often returned to port full.

The crew cast its nets into the dark waters. They fished all night, sleeping in shifts.

Just after dawn, the nets got caught on something. Pirani gunned the engine and, with a jolt, the nets came free. As some of the men peered over the side, the crew hauled in its catch: a barnacle-encrusted object that resembled a man.

"
Cest un morto!
" cried one of the fishermen. A dead man!

As the sea gave up its secret, it quickly became apparent that the thing was too rigid and heavy to be a man. The crew dragged it to the bow of the boat. The life-size figure weighed about three hundred pounds, had black holes for eyes, and was frozen in a curious pose. Its right hand was raised to its head. Given the thickness of its encrustations, it looked as if it had been resting on the sea floor for centuries.

The men went about the immediate work of mending the torn nets. It was only later, when they stopped for a breakfast of roasted fish, that one of them grabbed a gaffe and pried off a patch of barnacles.

He let out a yelp. "
Cest de oro!
" he cried, pointing at the flash of brilliant yellow. Gold!

Pirani pushed through the huddle and looked at the exposed metal. Not gold, he declared, bronze. None of them had ever seen anything like it. It might be worth something. The
Ferris
men made a hasty decision. Rather than turn the figure over to local authorities, they would sell it and divvy up the profits.

As the
Ferri
motored back to Fano that afternoon, word came over the radio that the town was afire with news of the discovery. The spark had come earlier, when the captain had mentioned it while chatting ship to shore with his wife. Crowds had gathered in the port for the
Ferris
return. Pirani cut the engine and waited until nightfall. By the time the
Ferri
pulled into port, it was nearly 3
A.M.
and the docks were deserted.

The crew brought the statue ashore on a handcart, hidden under a pile of nets, and took it to the house of Pirani's cousin, who owned the boat. After a few days, the statue began to smell of rotting fish. The cousin moved it to a covered garden patio and quietly invited several local antique dealers to have a look. They offered up to one million lire, but the crew wanted more.

With the statue's stench growing stronger by the day, the cousin fretted that someone would alert the police. He asked a friend with a Fiat 600 Mutipla to pick up the bronze statue and take it to a farm outside town, where they kept it buried in a cabbage field while they looked for a serious buyer.

A month later, they found Giacomo Barbetti, an antiquarian whose wealthy family owned a cement factory in Gubbio, fifty miles inland from Fano. Barbetti said that he was prepared to pay several million lire for the statue but naturally needed to see it first. When the figure emerged from the cabbage patch, Barbetti brushed aside the dirt, touched its straight nose, and surmised it to be the work of Lysippus, one of the master sculptors of ancient Greece.

Lysippus was the personal sculptor of Alexander the Great, and his fame as a sculptor spread throughout the ancient world on the heels of his patron's conquests. Lysippus rewrote the canon for Greek sculpture with figures that were more slender and symmetrical than those of his predecessors Polyclitus and the great Phidias, sculptor of the Acropolis friezes. Aside from busts of Alexander, Lysippus was famous for depicting athletes, and many of his bronzes lined the pathways of Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games. Lysippus is said to have created more than fifteen hundred sculptures in his lifetime, but none was believed to have survived antiquity.

Except, perhaps, this one. The bronze athlete in the cabbage patch may well have been one of those lining the pathways of Olympia, only to become war booty for Rome, whose glory slowly eclipsed that of Athens. As they swept through the Greek mainland and islands, Roman soldiers filled thousands of ships with plunder. Some three hundred years after its creation, around the time of Christ, the bronze athlete was likely torn from its pedestal in one such raid and loaded onto a waiting transport ship headed for Rome. The Adriatic was as fickle then as it is today, whipping up deadly storms without warning. The ship bearing the bronze athlete apparently sank to the sea floor, where it lay for two thousand years.

As Barbetti touched the foul-smelling figure's nose, he clearly saw something he liked. He offered 3.5 million lire—about $4,000, enough to buy several houses in Fano at the time. The money was split among the crew. Captain Pirani's share was about $1,600, double his monthly wages.

The bronze, meanwhile, was on the move.

F
EARFUL THAT POLICE
would search the warehouse of his family's cement company, Barbetti deposited the statue in a church in Gubbio, where Father Giovanni Nagni wrapped it in a red velvet curtain and hid it in the sacristy. When the stench of the figure became overwhelming, Father Nagni moved it to his house and submerged it in a bathtub of salt water.

A string of cars with foreign license plates began arriving with prominent antiquities dealers from across Europe. One brought with him an Italian restoration expert who, unsettled by the bronze's importance, informed the Carabinieri, Italy's national police. A raid was planned to seize the statue, but someone in town caught wind of it and warned Barbetti. When the Carabinieri arrived days later, the statue was gone. Some said it had been smuggled out of Italy in a car from Milan. Others claimed it had been packed on a boat filled with bootleg cigarettes, headed for France. Some even claimed that the Barbettis had coated the bronze in cement from their factory and shipped it to a monastery in Brazil.

In 1966, with the statue still missing, the Carabinieri filed criminal charges against Barbetti and Father Nagni. Under Italy's cultural property law, archaeological objects found by chance after 1939 were the property of the state. Anyone found in possession of such objects was guilty of theft. Barbetti and Nagni were convicted and sentenced to jail, but Italy's highest court threw out the convictions in 1968, saying there was not enough evidence to establish that the statue had been found in Italian waters.

The statue resurfaced in London three years later. It had apparently spent those years hidden in a monastery in Brazil before being sold for $700,000 to a Luxembourg-based art consortium called Artemis. When the German antiquities dealer Heinz Herzer, a member of the consortium, saw the statue in a London warehouse, he felt a chill go down his spine. He could clearly see through the crust of shells that it was an athlete—a favorite theme of ancient sculptors. But this was no typical work. This athlete's head was tilted back slightly to the left, as if he was gazing up at a stadium full of admirers. His long body was twisted slightly in the other direction, giving him an exquisite tension. Most striking was the way his right hand hovered just centimeters from the olive wreath on his head: an Olympian caught in a moment of victorious ecstasy.

Herzer shipped the bronze to his studio in Munich, where he and a conservation expert spent weeks removing the centuries of encrustation with a scalpel, careful not to scratch the bronze underneath. He then had the bronze x-rayed, exposing a hollow interior stuffed with debris from the artist's workshop. Freed of its crustacean cocoon, the figure's skin showed an advanced case of "bronze disease," a destructive rust that leaves reddish spots of crystallized copper oxide on an object's surface. To arrest the corrosion, the bronze was immersed in a chemical bath. From then on, it would have to be kept at low humidity to prevent further damage.

Carbon-14 dating confirmed that the statue predated Roman times. Herzer's research led him to the same conclusion as Barbetti. The skill and proportions of the work pointed to Lysippus. Could this be the only surviving example of the great master's work?

To sell the figure for a price worthy of an original Greek masterpiece, Herzer needed only one more thing: the opinion of a reputable expert in ancient art. The German dealer decided to send photos and his detailed report to Bernard Ashmole, the curator of Greek and Roman art at the British Museum.

Ashmole was widely revered for his scholarship and professionalism. He had become the keeper of Greek and Roman art in 1939, after British Museum officials discovered that his predecessor had allowed museum staff to scrub priceless monuments, including the Elgin Marbles, with steel wool. His counsel was widely sought by other curators and prominent collectors. When he received the package from Herzer, Ashmole immediately recognized the bronze as a masterpiece. What's more, he suspected that Herzer's attribution to Lysippus might be correct.

In the spring of 1972, not long after receiving the photos, Ashmole got into his car and drove an hour outside London to a vast Tudor manor called Sutton Place. It belonged to one of the world's richest men and likely the only collector with ancient art who would have the money to acquire this superb piece.

He had come to talk to J. Paul Getty.

W
HEN THE BRONZE
athlete came his way, Getty was a shrunken, decrepit man. Nearly eighty years old, he hardly filled out the suit and tie he had worn like a uniform since his teens. Getty wasn't an angry man, but he looked like one. His heavily lidded eyes, framed by jowly cheeks, gave him a perpetual scowl. He kept his thoughts hidden behind a stony exterior. Photos invariably captured him in an awkward pose, arms at his side, chin down, expression blank. With a receding hairline, bulbous nose, and stiff demeanor, he bore a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon, a person for whom—along with Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin, Ringo Starr, and Queen Elizabeth II—Getty expressed admiration.

Yet Getty's mind was still sharp enough to run a far-flung empire from an overstuffed chair in his study, surrounded by stacks of reports from Getty Oil and the two hundred other companies he controlled. Money had always been his chief passion, but women were a close second. Having divorced his fifth wife long before, Getty still kept a rotating harem of young women to satisfy his unquenchable libido. For years, he callously led them on with promises that he would "take care" of them in his will. Each evening during dinner, they jockeyed to sit at his right at the long, formal dining table, vying to be the one invited upstairs to the billionaire's bed.

Getty micromanaged his empire down to two decimal places and kept daily tallies of his expenses—35 cents for candy, $1.05 for a sandwich. Visitors at Sutton Place were asked to use a pay phone for outgoing calls. His reputation as a skinflint had been sealed years earlier by his refusal to pay the ransom to free his grandson, who had been kidnapped by the Calabrian Mafia. Getty ignored their demands until the kidnappers sent a package containing one of his grandson's ears, complete with a distinguishing freckle, to a newspaper in Rome.

If Getty was tight with his money, he was tighter with his praise. Of the five sons he fathered by four women, one died young (Getty missed the funeral because he was away on business) and the others were estranged, driven out of the family oil business and their father's life by Getty's incorrigible stinginess. Only his son George had shown promise in the family business and went on to become president of a Getty Oil subsidiary. After years of paternal indifference and disapproval, however, he committed suicide in 1973 by stabbing himself in the stomach, then swallowing an overdose of pills when he was hospitalized.