[MSN] The Medici Conspiracy / Mona Lisa Revealed. Historical conspiracy theories meet the art world in these two scholarly works, writes Frank Campbell.

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The Medici Conspiracy / Mona Lisa Revealed
Historical conspiracy theories meet the art world in these two scholarly
works, writes Frank Campbell
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July 15, 2006
 
Illustration: Sturt Krygsman
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19755904-5003900,00.html
 
The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities 
By Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini 
Hardie Grant Books, 380pp, $34.95 
Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo's Model 
By Giuseppe Pallanti 
Skira, 119pp, $29.95
COULD it possibly be true that the world's greatest museums and collectors
have presided over the worst destruction of ancient archeological heritage
in history? Can they really be responsible for stripping the Mediterranean,
China, Nepal, Iraq, India, Cambodia, Peru, Niger and all the rest? 

In the past 40 years, globalisation of the antiquities market has led to
unparalleled theft. More than 100,000 Italian tombs have been robbed.
Peasants with picks and heavy machinery have hacked their way through half
their patrimony. Frescoes have been sawn up, vases deliberately smashed to
facilitate smuggling and priceless objects damaged to disguise their
importance. The fate of individual objects is one thing; far worse is the
elimination of the archeological record. If sites are not recorded
scientifically, they're useless. The history of mankind itself is
compromised. 

The stolen artefacts can also lose their meaning. Who made them and where?
How do they fit into the story of civilisation? It gets worse. The muddying
of the historical record enables forging to flourish. Entire categories of
bogus objects arise, modelled on fakes with a spurious provenance. 

It's all about provenance. An object's provenance is its personal history.
Museums, collectors and auction houses venerate it. Provenance adds much to
the value of an object. Genuine provenance validates cultural context as
well as legal title. 

Peter Watson's provenance is impressive. Formerly an investigative
journalist and now attached to a Cambridge University research institute, he
specialises in exposing art fraud. Sotheby's: The Inside Story is perhaps
his best-known book. Cecilia Todeschini, his co-author, cut her teeth on the
mass Mafia trials in the 1990s. The Medici Conspiracy is a forensic
thriller. You can put it down, but only to make coffee. Based on court
records and police files, it starts in 1994 with Italian police pursuing
stolen vases in Germany. Raiding a suspect's warehouse, they stumbled on an
Aladdin's cave of looted antiquities, the centrepiece of which was a
20m-long pool crammed with recently excavated terracotta vessels. Immersion
in water is the first step in restoration of these objects. Detailed records
were seized. In 1995 the trail led to a Swiss warehouse, owned by the Mr Big
of Italian antiquities theft, Giacomo Medici. Medici traded loot for
decades: 3800 artefacts were found in his warehouse, stolen items and
numerous fakes as well as the real thing. He kept meticulous records (35,000
pages) and thousands of photographs. Years of painstaking detective work
then tracked the looted artefacts from tomb to dealer to museum, collector
and auction house. Medici was convicted in 2004, sentenced to 10 years in
prison and fined $16 million. An appeal is pending. 

The key to unravelling the criminal network was a diagram discovered by
police, which listed names, roles and places. The trade was vast and well
organised, reminiscent of global drug trafficking. It was also lucrative at
the top end: a Sicilian silver hoard, for example, was sold by local robbers
for $40,000, then for more than $1million to a Swiss dealer, then for $4
million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There's no justice in
the criminal world: the peasants received only 1 per cent of the final
price. Disgraced London dealer Robin Symes was found with $500 million worth
of dodgy antiquities in 33 warehouses. These revelations have already had an
impact on the policy and practice of nations and cultural institutions. 

The worst offenders, the Getty Museum and the Metropolitan, have repatriated
looted objects. Sotheby's ceased auctioning antiquities in London in 1997,
although much of the trade simply switched to Bonhams. An academic study
showed that 82 per cent of recent collections had no provenance. The
provenance of most of the rest was mere euphemism, validating an object by
reference to other recently looted collections, or vaguely referring to some
regional origin. Museum curators did the same. 

The Medici Conspiracy has been attacked by American critics, who claim that
dealers and curators are not part of a grand criminal conspiracy. It's just
market forces, runs the argument. This is disingenuous. Curators of big
museums know full well that the vast majority of unprovenanced antiquities
are recently looted. At the very least, they turn a blind eye. Big museum
money drives the trade. For all the talk of a new, chastened integrity, old
attitudes die hard. Take this statement in the Baltimore Sun on June 21 this
year by a leading US museum director, referring to Robert Hecht, doyen of
American antiquities dealers: "I don't think that there's a museum in this
country that doesn't have something that Bob Hecht sold them ... thanks to
Bob Hecht there are many of us in this world who are able to see works of
art that reflect on our shared heritage." Hecht is now on trial in Italy for
criminal conspiracy, as is Marion True, former Getty Museum curator. 

A review cannot do justice to the intricate web of dealer deceit. You'll
just have to read the book. 

What a relief now to turn to genuine scholarship and a brave attempt to
deepen our understanding of the provenance of "Madonna" Lisa. Guiseppe
Pallanti, a Florentine teacher, spent decades trawling the city's archives.
It paid off. Pallanti proves that Leonardo da Vinci's family knew Ser
Francesco del Giocondo, who married Lisa Gherardini in 1495. There's no
proof of a commission, but it seems likely. Lisa's social world is
fascinating, married as she was to an adventurous entrepreneur. It's hard to
believe that Renaissance Florence had a population of only 60,000. There's a
salutary message there. 

The Mona Lisa was regarded as a masterpiece from the start. Pallanti regards
it as a turning point in Renaissance portraiture, beyond "faithful
reproduction" to "the fully successful (representation of) ... mind and body
... (expressing) the mystery and absolute that is in each of us". Whether
this is more a manifestation of the recent Mona Lisa fetish than accurate
history of art, I'm not sure. 

Whatever, Leonardo kept the painting, apparently modifying it for years.
Pallanti suggests that in the end the Mona Lisa was "more symbolic than
real". But aren't we all? 

Frank Campbell is very real; he's even more symbolic. 

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/