[MSN] BOOK REVIEW: 'The Medici Conspiracy' Details Web of Deceit of Museums, Tomb Robbers, Dealers and Antiquities of Dubious Provenance.

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Aug. 28, 2007 
 
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Medici Conspiracy' Details Web of Deceit of Museums, Tomb
Robbers, Dealers and Antiquities of Dubious Provenance 
 
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic 
 
 John Keats, the English Romantic poet, famously wrote in "Ode on a Grecian
Urn" that "beauty is truth, truth beauty,-- that is all ye know on earth and
all ye need to know." 
 
Keats was writing in the early 19th Century, a time of intense interest in
Greek and Roman antiquities and a time of feverish collecting of vases,
urns, statues, bronzes, coins, silverware and other objects. There were
legitimate archaeological excavations - and the kind of tomb robbers that
are described in "The Medici Conspiracy" by Peter Watson and Cecilia
Todeschini (PublicAffairs, 407 pages, index, photographs, $16.95). 
 
Subtitled "The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb
Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums," this is a revised quality
paperback edition of a hardcover book published last year, with the current
volume updating the ongoing trials of several people covered by art crime
reporter Watson and interpreter and researcher Todeschini. 
 
Italy may be the home of fast automobiles, but the authors say it has some
of the slowest criminal and civil trials, with plenty of time out for lunch
breaks. Trials can last for years and the trials of Marion True and Robert
E. Hecht Jr. - to name just two people in the book - are ongoing. 
 
The book has a gigantic cast of characters (a listing of them in the front
would have helped a reader who was constantly referring to the index) and
reads like a crime novel -- most of the time. There are excerpts from trials
that bog the book down and could have been consigned to the "dossier" at the
back of the present book. 
 
It's crime all right, but true crime, with a dedicated detective, Roberto
Conforti, head of the Carabinieri's art squad. Italy's Carabinieri is a
police force that is part of the army and Col. Conforti - he recently
retired with the rank of general -- brought legal training to his art squad
post, which he had held since 1990. Conforti, who joined the Carabinieri at
the age of 19, was used to dealing with tough characters, having worked in
areas of Italy controlled by the Camorra (the Naples region's version of the
Mafia) and bandits in Sardinia. 
 
Marion True was a curator at the famous J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles,
while Robert Hecht, born in 1919, is a controversial art dealer, part of the
Hecht department store family from Baltimore. They are among the dozens of
people included in this book, which toggles back and forth between 1972,
when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it had acquired a rare calyx
krater, a two-handled wine/water mixing bowl by the Greek master Euphronios.

 
Provenance - documentation on how an antiquity was discovered - is all
important in the art business, and the authors repeatedly make the point
that museums are often careless - to say the least -- about acquiring
objects lacking valid provenance. The Getty, which now has a gleaming
hilltop building in the Sepulveda Pass in addition to its copy of a Roman
villa in Malibu, is particularly lax on this area, assert Watson and
Todeschini, and former Getty curator Marion True is particularly suspect. 
 
It took a fatal car crash on an Italian autostrada in 1994 to establish the
link to Giacomo Medici, who was convicted of looting and conspiracy by an
Italian court in 2006. He's appealing the conviction, but his warehouse in a
"free port" area of Geneva, Switzerland contained thousands of apparently
looted antiquities, and Polaroid photos of object that appear to be taken by
tomb robbers -- enough objects, the authors say to keep Christie's, Bonham's
and Sotheby's auction houses going for years. 
 
Pasqual Camera's overturned Renault, with the dead Italian fiscal official
in it, led to looting mastermind Medici and others, thanks to damning
evidence in the glove compartment, which in turn led to Camera's apartment
and an organization chart or "organigram" showing how the network or
"cordata" of antiquity dealers operated throughout Italy, Switzerland and
other countries. 
 
I found Chapter 18 "The Woodcutter's Archive" particularly entertaining and
enlightening. It deals with Giuseppe Evangelisti, a woodcutter by day in a
rural north of Rome and a tomb robber by night. "Peppino il Taglialegna" -
Peppino the Woodcutter - was a meticulous robber, professionally
photographing (photography was his hobby) his loot in a part of the country
particularly rich in antiquities and keeping detailed records, many of which
tied him to to the cordata outlined in Camera's organization chart - a chart
reproduced in the back of the book. 
 
Authors Todeschini and Watson, who also wrote a book about corruption at the
famous Sotheby's auction house and has produced a TV special on antiquities
looting, trace Medici's underground network of middlemen and tombaroli, or
tomb robbers, and link them to corrupt dealers such as Robin Symes as well
as to established institutions including Sotheby's, the Getty Museum and the
Metropolitan Museum - stating that Medici supplied most, if not all, of the
major collections of classical antiquities that have been established since
the end of World War II. 
 
Symes is particularly interesting because of his business and personal
relationship with a Greek shipping heir, Christo Michaelidis, who died in an
accident in July 1999. The three-decade-long relationship was described as a
"marriage," although Symes, an Englishman who was convicted and imprisoned
in London's Pentonville Prison, denies it was a homosexual one. 
 
About that Euphronios krater, the one acquired by Metropolitan Museum
Director Thomas Hoving in 1972; the Metropolitan Museum in late 2005
announced that it will return the vase along with other antiquities - in the
near future. Current Met director Philippe de Montebello announced in early
2006 that title will revert to the Italian government, but the actual
transfer of objects has yet to occur, the authors note. 
 
"The Medici Conspiracy" is a fascinating look at a cultural criminal network
that features travel around Europe and the Mediterranean as much as the
wanderings of fictional spy Jason Bourne in the current movie "The Bourne
Ultimatum." It would make an intriguing mini-series for an enterprising
network like The Discovery Channel. 
 
Publisher's web site: www.publicaffairsbooks.com