The Medici Conspiracy (72 page)

• A red-figure Attic kylix signed by Douris and a red-figure Attic
kalpis,
attributed to the Kleophrades Painter. Douris (fl c. 500–c. 460 BC) had a long career and produced at least 280 vases, according to Beazley. He had his own school and because his works appear in the works of other painters, it is clear that he was well known and well regarded among
his collegues. The Kleophrades Painter flourished between roughly 505 and 475 BC but never signed his works, so he is named after the potter Kleophrades, son of Amasis, a well-known black-figure painter. Kleophrades' signature appears on an exceptionally large red-figure cup in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A
kalpis
was, like a
hydria,
a water jug but, unlike a
hydria,
tended not to have a neck and shoulders. Among the documentation seized in Geneva were negatives showing these objects on display in the Getty, though they were also shown in Medici's Polaroids, still in fragments. According to Getty records, these objects were bought through Robin Symes.

• Next, there was what was described in the public prosecutor's report as a “mutilated” marble statue of a
kouros
(a statue of a youth). This was acquired by the Getty in June 1993 but was never exhibited “in spite of its being an extremely important object.” This statue was found in the photographs seized from Medici, still dirty with earth.

• A male marble head was acquired by the Getty in the late 1980s. This too appears in the negatives seized in Geneva, where the head is shown on display in the Getty Museum. But Pellegrini also discovered an image of the head among the Polaroids, where it was covered in dirt and earth. This object was offered to the Getty by Robin Symes, and from the documentation furnished by the museum, we learn that it arrived in the Getty with light encrustations of a mixture of iron clay and carbonate. These are the disfigurements a statue would acquire over the years while it was in the ground and are, usually, the first things a restorer or museum curator would remove.

• A red-figure Attic
amphora,
decorated with a scene in which the protagonists are fighting over a tripod. This, acquired by the Getty in 1979, was found among the Polaroids at Medici's warehouse in Geneva, pictured as covered with encrustations. According to Getty documentation provided to Ferri, this object was purchased by the museum from Antike Kunst Palladion in Basel, owned by Gianfranco Becchina.

• A red-figure Attic
kylix
attributed to Epiktetos was acquired by the Getty in the early 1980s. Epiktetos flourished between 520 and 480 BC, and he was one of the major artists of the first generation of red-figure vase painters. Over 112 vases by him survive, most of which are
kylix
types, though he also painted plates. Valued at $60,000, this
kylix
appears to have been donated to the museum by Michael R. Milken in August 1983 and to have come from the Rycroft Collection in London. (Milken was “the junk bond king,” the banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert, a firm that was one of the leaders of the mergers and acquisition mania of the 1980s. He was indicted in 1989, pleaded guilty to one charge of securities fraud, and was jailed for ten years.) Yet here, too, the
kylix
was found among the Polaroids in Medici's warehouse in Geneva, where it is shown as not only dirty but fragmented.

• A Corinthian
olpe,
shown in a photograph in Geneva, on which is written, “Photo sent to the P.G.M. on the 30/12/91.”

• A red-figure Attic
phiale
(a shallow dish) signed by Douris, with an inscription by the ceramicist Smikros. This, bearing a graffito in Etruscan letters, was acquired in fragments (see Chapter 9 for more detail).

• A red-figure chalice-
krater
, signed by Syriskos. This was acquired for the Getty as part of the Fleischman Collection (see Chapter 9).

• A red-figure Attic chalice attributed to the Berlin Painter. This too was acquired in fragments over a period of six years (see Chapter 9).

• A Corinthian
olpe
and a three-lobed Corinthian
oinochoe
attributed to the Vatican Painter, purchased from Robin Symes in 1985.

• A mirror with cover, decorated in bas-relief, purchased from Robin Symes and acquired for the Getty as part of the Fleischman Collection (see Chapter 9).

• A polychrome marble
lekanis
(a votive bath)
,
a marble sculpture depicting polychrome griffins, and a marble statue of Apollo with a griffin. Purchased by the Getty as part of the Maurice Tempelsman Collection (see Chapter 9). The Polaroids of these objects, all found in Geneva, all bear the same batch number. These objects are shown in fragments, resting on an Italian newspaper.

• A ceremonial table, with griffins.

• A marble head, a Roman era copy of Polycleitus's Diadoumenos. Polycleitus, along with Myron, Phidias, Lysippus, and Praxiteles, was one of the great classical Greek sculptors. The Diadoumenous, together with the Doryphorus (the ideal human form), was one of his two most famous compositions. This was actually stolen from Venosa, a town not far from Melfi from whose museum the eight vases were stolen, which had triggered off Operation Geryon. The Diadoumenos was returned to Italy. It was acquired by the Getty through the Fleischman Collection (see Chapter 9).

• An Etruscan antefix in the shape of a dancing Menades and Silenus. This was partially burned at some point in the past, and the burning is shown both on the object in the Getty and in the Polaroid photographs seized in Geneva. The antefix was acquired by the museum as part of the Fleischman Collection (see Chapter 9).

• A Roman fresco, a lunette with a mask of Hercules. There was a twin to this among the objects in Medici's warehouse in Geneva. It was acquired by the museum as part of the Fleischman Collection (see Chapter 9).

• A red-figure Apulian bell-
krater
attributed to the Choregos Painter. This, shown in the Medici Polaroids, was sold by Fritz Bürki to the Fleischmans, from whom the Getty acquired it (see Chapter 9).

• A marble statue of Tyche. Acquired by the Fleischmans from Robin Symes, it was then purchased by the Getty as part of their collection (see Chapter 9).

• A small statue of Dionysos with an animal. In the Fleischman Collection.

• A black-figure Attic
amphora
attributed by Dietrich von Bothmer to the Berlin Painter. On one of the seized photographs the following words are visible: “OK con Bo 14/2/91. TUTTA MIA” (“OK with Bo 14/2/91. ALL MINE”). “Bo” here stands for Bob Hecht, as is shown by the fact that the
amphora
had been published in Atlantis Antiquities' catalog,
Greek and Etruscan Art of the Archaic Period
(New York, 1988). The
amphora
was purchased by the Getty Museum with the Fleischman Collection.

• A black-figure Attic
amphora
attributed by von Bothmer to the Three Lines Group (a group whose distinguishing characteristic was a motif of three short lines). It was sold by Bürki to the Fleischmans in 1989 and was acquired by the Getty from them. A note in the Getty files, which they were forced to make available to the Italian public prosecutor, reported that “RG” (Robert Guy, of Princeton) had said that this object had been “
found together with
” another object, still in the possession of “REH” (Robert Emmanuel Hecht) and a vase—a
hydria
by the Würzburg Painter—still in the possession of Robin Symes (italics added). This is a clear sighting of the cordata at work.

• A red-figure Attic
kylix
attributed by Robert Guy to the Nikosthenes Painter. Sold to the Fleischmans by Robin Symes in 1988 and acquired by the Getty from them.

• A Pontic
amphora
by the Tityos Painter. Sold to the Fleischmans by Bürki in 1988 and acquired by the Getty from them.

• A red-figure Attic
amphora,
allegedly from the Rycroft Collection in England (1890), yet shown in the Polaroids seized in Geneva.

• A terra-cotta
askos
of the Clusium group, shaped like a duck. Donated to the Getty by Vasek Polak of Canada, this allegedly came from the S. Schweitzer Collection, dating from 1940. It too appears among the
seized Polaroids in Geneva. Clusium, the modern city of Chiusi, near Arezzo in Umbria, was named after Clusius, son of Tyrrhenos, one of the mythical founders of Etruria.

• An Attic Gianiform
kantharos
attributed to the Vatican Class. This was purchased by the Getty from the Royal Athena Galleries in New York.

• A red-figure Apulian bell-
krater
, bought from Fritz Bürki.

• A marble statue of Tyche, acquired in this instance, according to the documentation, from Robin Symes. The heavily draped female figure is identified as Tyche by her turreted crown, which probably also identified the city she was meant to protect. Once again, this statue is depicted in the photographs seized in Geneva, where it is shown before it had been cleaned of the dirt that was encrusted on it. It was an important object, purchased by the museum from the Fleischmans for $2 million. In antiquity the Greek word
tyche
, meaning chance or fortune, with its inherent mutability, applied to both men and cities. The great centers of Antioch and Alexandria both established cults to the goddess Tyche, but smaller towns would have worshipped her, too.

• A Roman fresco, a lunette showing a mask of Hercules and valued at $95,000, was acquired by the Fleischmans from Bürki. On this occasion, however, the fresco was associated with Medici not because of any photographs, but because, in dimensions, subject matter, and condition, in Ferri's words, it “would appear to be a twin to another fresco” seized in Geneva from Medici. In the catalog of the Passion for Antiquities exhibition, in relation to catalog number 126, the text reads: “The superb illusionism of Second-Style Roman wall painting is brilliantly in evidence in this fragment from the upper zone of a Pompeian wall.” It goes on: “The upper portion of the fresco matches
precisely the upper portion of a fresco section in the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection . . . and is from the same room as catalogue number 125.”

• Catalog number 125 was another fresco fragment, consisting of two rectangular panels and showing landscape scenes bathed in a light blue-green hue. The text says that based on the right-to-left orientation of the shadows on the columns, “this was part of the right-hand wall upon entering the room.” These two items recall the frescoes from the Pompeian villa that Pellegrini first encountered when delving into Medici's documentation—they too were of the Second Style (see entry just above).

• There was even more of a paper trail in connection with a black-figure Attic
amphora
attributed by Dietrich von Bothmer to the Berlin Painter 1686 and dated to circa 540 BC. (This painter is called the “Berlin Painter 1686” because his name vase is also in the Berlin Museum and the “1686” refers to the museum acquisition number, to distinguish him from another Berlin Painter, whose name vase is in the same museum.) Depicted on both sides of the vase is one of the twelve labors of Hercules, one of which is the theft of the cattle of Geryon, the triple-bodied warrior, and the legend after which the original investigation of Conforti's Art Squad was named.

• No less revealing was another black-figure
amphora
attributed by von Bothmer to the Three Lines Group (a group whose distinguishing characteristic was a motif of three short lines). This
amphora
can be seen in numerous regular photographs and Polaroids seized from
Medici in Geneva. It was offered to the Getty by the Fleischmans, having been sold to them by Fritz Bürki in June 1989. From other documentation, we find that “RG” (Robert Guy) said that this object had been “found together with” another object with gigantomachia (the revolt of the Giants against the Gods, and their consequent slaughter, a familiar theme in classical and Hellenistic art) that was still in the possession of “REH” (Robert Emmanuel Hecht), and a third vase, a
hydria
of the Würzburg painter, “still in the possession of” Robin Symes. How did Guy know this? Here, plainly, more triangulations are in operation, or in the process of beginning. This is a clear sighting of the cordata.

• A separate vase, a red-figure Attic
kylix,
attributed by Robert Guy to the Nikosthenes Painter, is also seen in the Polaroids seized in Geneva; it then became part of the Fleischman Collection, sold to them through Symes in 1988.

• In the
same
Polaroid as the Attic
kylix
was a Pontic
amphora
by the Tityos Painter, seen with prominent encrustations but also in another photograph after it has been restored. This amphora, dated to 530–510 BC and showing the scenes of Medusa's death, reached the Fleischmans through Bürki in 1988, valued at $400,000. It was acquired by the Getty with the
kylix.

• A red-figure Apulian bell-
krater
was seen in the Medici Polaroids. By the time it reached the Fleischmans, it had been attributed (by A. D. [Dale] Trendall) to the Choregos Painter and dated to circa 380 B.C. This was different from the other vases in that it was a “comic” vase. Rather than depicting a scene from everyday life or from mythology, it showed a scene from a
phylax
play, a type of farcical comedy that was widely performed in southern Italy during the fourth and third centuries BC. The action takes place on a wooden stage, with the grain of the wood being indicated. At stage-left there is a door and steps lead down off the boards. There are a number of characters on the stage itself, two indicated by an inscription that describes them as “
choregos.
” This meaning is not certain. It could mean “leaders of the chorus,” but
they could also be “backers of the play.” The
krater
was important because of its rarity and because it was more or less complete. It has been published several times in important reference works on Greek vases. In fact this was the name-vase for the Choregos Painter, meaning it was the object used—by Trendall—to name this artist, whose work is known from a few other examples around the world. The Fleischmans acquired the
krater
from Fritz Bürki and when the Getty bought it, the vase was valued at $185,000, yet another example of the fact that Medici dealt not in everyday dross but in very important objects. Did the Fleischmans
never
ask themselves where Fritz Bürki and Robin Symes got these objects?

• The same pattern is also evident with a small statue of Dionysus, accompanied by an animal. It formed part of the Fleischman Collection and, again, is depicted in the photographs seized in Geneva.