WHOSE ART WAS IT ANYWAY?

Jerry Harkins

Nego in Sicilia tota, tam locupleti, tam vetere provincia, tot oppidis, tot familiis tam copiosis, ullum argenteum vas, ullum Corinthium aut Deliacum fuisse, ullam gemmam aut margaritam, quicquam ex auro aut ebore factum, signum ullum aeneum, marmoreum, eburneum, nego ullam picturam neque in tabula neque in textili, quin conquisierit, inspexerit, quod placitum sit, abstulerit.

                                                                                                —M. T. Cicero[i]

In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a large Greek bowl known as the Euphronios krater to Italy.  The Italian government alleged that it was illegally looted from an Etruscan tomb in 1971 and sold to the Roman art dealer Giacomo Medici, a  convicted smuggler of antiquities.  He sold it to a dealer named Robert Hecht who sold it to the Met for $1.2 million in 1972.  Mr. Hecht was tried in Italy for trafficking in antiquities.  Whether or not he was guilty, the trial, in typical Italian fashion, was opera buffa and was ultimately dismissed because the statue of limitations had expired.  This was in 2012, the same year Mr. Hecht died.  But the Met had already been done in by the PR.

A bit of background color:  At the outset of World War II, the Fascist government of Italy amended its antiquity laws to assert state ownership of all antiquities discovered anywhere in Italy.  It also limited the rights of owners of any cultural material that had been in Italy for 50 years or more regardless of its origin.  The Fascists were not socialists so this assertion of state ownership was an exception to the general law of found objects at the time.  The basis for it was the further assertion that all such material was part of the “patrimony of the fatherland.”  Come again?  The krater was made by a Greek potter and a Greek painter working in Athens.  The fatherland called Italy was (and is) a jerrybuilt mosaic comprised of seven independent states cobbled together by force and violence between 1792 and 1870.  There was no “Italy” until 1861 and unification—the Risorgimento—has never been happy or successful.  There is a “standard” Italian language derived from Latin and spoken in Tuscany but, for the most part, people speak fifteen regional dialects and 12 minority languages, all of them mostly mutually incomprehensible.  In other words, Italy is an idea more than a nation or a single ethnicity.  Not that this makes any legal difference:  today, as in 1939, Italy is a sovereign state and can make any property laws it wants.  And since hypocrisy is not illegal, it can even make such laws while simultaneously engaging in its own looting of Ethiopian treasures.  But the notion that the krater is part of an “Italian patrimony” is, at a minimum, eccentric. 

It must be noted that the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property of 1970 specifically states that any cultural property found in a particular country, regardless of its origin, is part of the cultural heritage of that country.  This is a breathtaking assertion of Diplomatic Doublethink but it expresses both Italian and international law even while it is a perfect proof of Mr. Bumble’s contention that the law is an ass.  A relic of the Andrea Doria washed up on Nantucket is simply not part of America’s cultural heritage.  But we must not dwell on this because the krater was undoubtedly dug up in Italy and exported illegally.

Thomas P. Hoving, the colorful and acquisitive Director of the Met who did the acquiring, suspected as much.  On first seeing it, he thought it was, “…the single most perfect work of art I had ever encountered.”  Almost immediately, though, The New York Times ran a series of articles claiming fraud[ii] and the New York District Attorney’s Racket Bureau took a conspiracy case to a grand jury which promptly dismissed it.[iii]  But the title of the chapter Hoving devotes to it in his 1993 memoirs is “The Hot Pot.”  Not surprisingly, the sobriquet stuck which did not help the museum’s PR problem.  Much later, on the website ArtNet, Dr. Hoving addressed himself to the question of whether it should be returned.  “Hell no.” he wrote, “Despite our suspicions, we bought it in good faith and it arrived legally to U.S. Customs.  There’s nothing the Italians can do about it or should.”  One can sympathize with this view without endorsing its logic.  The same can be said of the position of the Italian government.  The weakness of Hoving’s position is that it involves receiving property he knew or should have known was, under Italian law, stolen.  The weakness of the Italian case though lies in two entirely different problems.  First, the pot was not stolen in any rational sense of the word.  Second, its return created an enormously dangerous precedent.

According to my dictionary, the basic meaning of the word “steal” is “to take something that belongs to somebody else, illegally or without the owner’s permission.”  It’s the belonging to somebody else that poses a problem.  To whom did the krater belong if not to the person who dug it up?  The Italian government says it belonged to Italy because it was found there.  It belonged to the state only because the state said so.  Neither the potter nor the painter had ever traveled outside Athens so it seems fair to ask how it got to Italy and why, if it had to be returned, it was not returned to Greece.  Textbooks generally claim it had been “exported” to Tuscany but this is a conclusion without evidence and seems unlikely.  Little is known about the Etruscans but it is widely believed they practiced a fair amount of piracy.  So maybe the krater was stolen in the first place.  Maybe not.  More Greek pottery has been unearthed in Tuscany than in Greece so it could have been acquired in a legitimate trade transaction and no one will ever know for sure.  Indeed, the point is that we can never know who owned the pot before it was dug up and, after that, ‘finders keepers’ is as good a basis for moral judgments as any other guideline.

Those outraged by the Met’s original acquisition are mainly archeologists and other professionals who think they should have a monopoly on such objects, in the interests, of course, of humanity and the progress of archeology.  Control, they seem to think, should be vested in a tiny group of academics who will be free to use cultural artifacts as fuel for their priestly debates. The krater now rests comfortably in the National Etruscan Museum in the Via Vecchia, an outlying area of Rome.  The Wall Street Journal described it as:

The 16^th century house of Pope Julius III…a tranquil refuge from Rome’s noise and summer heat.  On a recent Saturday afternoon, the loudest sounds in the empty courtyard were the singing of cicadas and the soft gurgle of water in the Nymphaeum fountain.

The museum receives about 10,000 visitors a month during the high tourist season, about 4,000 fewer than visit the Met on an average day.

Patrimony is a tricky subject.  Literally, it refers to something one inherits from his or her father and, thus, by extension, something a people inherit from their ancestors or predecessors. But there is a difference.  A nation is not a person and its “ownership” is limited at best.  Nor does a government personify the people of a nation unless one accepts the theory of divine right.  A government may be the custodian of national property but the rights and obligations of custodians are not the same as those of owners.  Thus, when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it did not “own” the Bamiyan Buddhas and had no legal or moral right to destroy them.  The present Greek government argues that the Ottoman Sultan had no right to sell the Parthenon marbles to Lord Elgin even though Greece was, at the time, part of the Ottoman Empire.  In this belief, they are right.  And in the same way the present Greek government has no substantive claim to ownership of the marbles either.  It is not, of course, without standing in the matter.  Unlike the Italians and the krater, the Elgin marbles are the product of Greek genius, made by Greek artists in Greece.

Nothing is ever simple except for the assertion that a sovereign state can enact any damn fool law its politicians want.  That does not prevent rational people from analyzing the wisdom and justice of such dicta.  The context of the 1939 Italian antiquities law was the desire of the Fascists to forge a collective mythology and destiny for Italy based on the glory of imperial Rome much as their cousins in Germany were forging the Thousand Year Reich on the foundation of Teutonic folklore.  Benito Mussolini understood that the government he took over in 1922 was ineffective and its citizens demoralized in spite of having been on the winning side of World War I.  Victory had cost the Italians dearly in both human and economic terms and the Versailles Peace Treaty gave them virtually nothing.  In its aftermath, Mussolini promoted the rather eccentric idea that modern Italy was the rightful heir to the glories of the ancient Roman Empire which, in an even more eccentric twist, was supposed to be the rightful heir of the Golden Age of Greece.[iv]

For a country still struggling to create a sense of nationhood, it was an outrageous, grandiose simplification of history.  But Italy had been hemorrhaging art and other cultural materials for centuries.  Some of this traffic had been the result of perfectly legal transactions but much also had been looted.[v]  Napoleon Bonaparte was a master looter of Italian treasure which he used to endow the Louvre.  Following his defeat of the Papal States in 1796, he forced Pope Pius VI to cede hundreds of paintings, sculptures and manuscripts and to pay for their shipment to Paris.  About half of these items were ordered returned by the Duke of Wellington following the Battle of Waterloo.  The Pope could no longer afford the shipping which was paid for by the British government.  Our sympathy for the Italians is tempered by the knowledge that, historically, they were victimizers as often as victims.  Rome systematically looted the Empire and the city-states of the Renaissance were avid collectors and looters.  In fact, Napoleon justified his own looting by claiming that France was the successor to ancient Rome, the same argument that was later advanced by Mussolini.  The Napoleonic precedent was also invoked during and after World War II by Hitler and Stalin.

It is axiomatic that hypocrisy is no stranger to international dealings of all kinds.  Nor is it news that there are many problems and controversies that have no good solution and, in some cases, no obvious compromise.  In the grand scheme of the world’s problems, the case of the Euphronios krater is trivial and, in a saner world, its location would not occasion jingoistic saber rattling.  Of course in a sane world, an organization like UNESCO would not assert in the preamble to the 1970 convention that, “…cultural institutions, museums, libraries and archives should ensure that their collections are built up in accordance with universally recognized moral principles.”  If such principles existed outside the Wonderland of diplomacy, there would not be and never would have been a single cultural institution of any kind.  There would be no museum three thousand years from now when some enterprising farmer digs up a Jeff Koons “Balloon Dog” and tries to sell it for scrap in spite of the cries of archeologists about the despoliation of the American patrimony.

The real problem is a matter of drawing the line between things that really do cry out for repatriation and things that may as well stay where they are.  Obviously human remains and objects of sacred significance should be returned whenever possible.  In the United States, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 has proven to be a productive way of dealing with these issues at least on an ad hoc basis and has been remarkably free of controversy in practice.  There is, however, no clear line between sacred and profane objects. For example, Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece has been stolen on multiple occasions and was looted by both Napoleon and the Nazis.  It is widely regarded as an artistic masterpiece but is also clearly a work of sacred significance.

No one knows how many objects of cultural significance were looted during World War II but the total must be in the millions.  One widely quoted source claims that 20% of all such objects in European hands were stolen.  In addition, Germany destroyed hundreds of thousands of works of confiscated modern art which the Nazis considered “degenerate.”  The Soviets forcibly took millions of items after the war as “reparations.”  Much of this horde was taken from Germany and Poland and included objects that had previously been looted by the Germans from Italy and France.  The Western allies repatriated more than 700,000 works from the Wiesbaden Collection Point alone.[vi] 

Ultimately, looting, whether in war or by common thieves, is little more than ordinary human failure and the ranting and raving of the political class and other elitists will hardly put a dent in the problem.  The Euphronios krater and its kin have no real nationality but are the better side of the same human condition.  We can count ourselves fortunate that there are museums that collect and preserve the human heritage and make it available to all of us.  We can hope they will “return” what should be returned and to act in good faith without being instructed by those who would appoint themselves our official moralists.

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[i] In Verrem (Oration Against Verres), Book 4, Chapter 1.  “I say that in all Sicily, in that entire wealthy and ancient province, in all those wealthy towns and families, there was no silver vessel, no Corinthian or Delian plate, no jewel or pearl, nothing made of gold or ivory, no statue of marble or bronze or ivory, no painted or embroidered picture, that he did not seek out and examine and that, if he liked it, he did not take away.”  Looting is as ancient as art itself and all the world’s great museums are full of objects whose provenance is less than pristine.  Verres was the Roman Governor of Sicily and was a notorious thief and scoundrel.  Eventually he copped a plea which sent him into exile in Messina where he was outlawed by Mark Antony who wanted to loot some of his loot.

[ii] The Times loves this kind of story as does the American public.  There are hundreds of books on the subject, many of them carefully researched and well written.  Art theft and art forgery are the subject of more crime fiction than anything but murder.  But the interest of the Times seems distinctive and, perhaps, disproportionate.  Anything that offers it a chance to occupy the moral high ground and demonstrate its high minded and high browed superiority is sure to land on the front page.  If the offender happens to be a local cultural institution the temptation to anathematize it becomes irresistible.

[iii] The original investigation was undertaken at the behest of the Italian government and involved both the FBI and the New York City Police.  The grand jury investigation came later and was instigated by DA Robert M. Morgenthau, widely regarded as a saintly public servant but one whose favorite activity was to hold a press conference.  Be that as it may.  Like The Times, Mr. Morgenthau never shied away from any allegation that made him look holier than thou.  In this case, Hoving asserts, and I believe, he was conducting a vendetta because he despised Hoving’s “popularization” of the Met.

[iv] The foundation myth of the ancient Romans had the founding twins Romulus and Remus as descendants on their mother’s side of Aeneas of Troy.  The family of Julius Caesar regarded him as one of their ancestors.  The Trojans or Dardanians were the deadly enemies of Greece although their elite at the time of the Trojan War, including Aeneas, may have had Greek roots.

[v] The Louvre, arguably the world’s greatest art museum, was  built on the looted patrimony of other nations, notably Italy.  At one time, its collection included the Medici Venus, the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, “acquired” in 1803, 1820 and 1863 respectively, all of them Greek masterpieces looted from Italy.  In 1815, the French were forced to return the Medici to Florence which, at the time, was ruled by Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria.  Austria had been embarrassed by Napoleon on many occasions and was a member of the Seventh Coalition although its army had not participated in the Battle of Waterloo.  Actually, Austria  effectively ruled Tuscany between 1735 and 1860 so perhaps the krater might have been considered part of the Austrian patrimony. 

[vi] These numbers are educated guesses only but it should be borne in mind that German looting included ordinary furniture meant to be distributed to German citizens whose homes had been bombed and the Russian total may include factories and machinery.  In this politically correct age, virtually every source says that American soldiers also engaged in looting, obviously on a much reduced scale and with no known precious works of art involved.  Some, however, no doubt participated in the illegal trading of precious material that was rampant after VE Day and some such material was later sold to American collectors.