[CPProt.net] Italy trial giving museums wakeup call

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Italy trial giving museums wakeup call
November 15, 2005
By FRANCES D'EMILIO
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

ROME -- Italy, Greece and other countries steeped in antiquity have long
tried - and failed - to keep precious remnants of their past within their
borders. Now museums around the world are getting a wakeup call from the
trial of two Americans.

Marion True, formerly antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles, is accused of receiving stolen antiquities from Italy. She resigned
last month after museum officials confronted her about a personal loan she
secured with the help of one of the museum's main suppliers.

Art dealer Robert Hecht allegedly acted as an intermediary between art
thieves and museums.

The Getty has defended True's work, and she and Hecht have denied any
wrongdoing.

The trial, which resumes in Rome on Wednesday after a four-month recess,
grew out of the probe into the activities of Italian antiquities dealer
Giacomo Medici. He was convicted in Rome last year of conspiring to traffic
in looted antiquities and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He remains free
during his appeal.

Italy has strict laws stipulating that antiquities belong to the state and
cannot leave its territory, except on loan for exhibition. Other countries
rich in ancient history have similar restrictions.


"The near totality of the international market - not just in Italy, but also
in Mesopotamia, South America - is illegal," said Giuseppe Proietti, an
archaeologist with the Italian culture ministry.

Still, museums long got away with illicit trafficking of artifacts from
clandestine digs, said Colin Renfrew, a fellow of the McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, England.

The problem for investigators is coming up with hard proof of where and when
the objects were excavated, said Richard M. Leventhal, director of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in
Philadelphia.

Police searching Medici's office in Geneva found photographs of artifacts
still in the ground, strongly suggesting they came from a clandestine dig.
Italian prosecutors also got crucial cooperation from Switzerland, which two
years ago ratified the 1970 UNESCO treaty allowing countries to reclaim
illegally acquired antiquities.

Like Britain, which signed the treaty in 2002, Switzerland was long
considered a hub of illegal trafficking in artifacts. Now antiquities
dealers there are required to record every item entering their shops.

Italy has a police squad devoted to recovering illegally excavated
artifacts. The University of Pennsylvania museum helped train the FBI's new
Art Crime Team in Philadelphia.

"Illicit trade today is very dangerous for museums," Dimitris Pandermalis, a
prominent Greek archaeologist, said in a telephone interview from Athens.

Italy is seeking the return of a 2,600-year-old Greek vase from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met confirmed an invitation by Italy's
culture minister to discuss the demand but declined to elaborate.

Defense lawyers said that the prosecutor in the True trial has been pressing
Medici to help Italy recover antiquities from the Metropolitan, the Getty
and other U.S. museums. Cooperation could shave several years off his
sentence.

In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts said it was in contact with Italian
authorities about news reports that they have pictures suggesting a statue,
a vase and a jar obtained by the museum had been legally acquired.

"We knew we had purchased things from Hecht," Dawn Griffin, the museum's
director of public relations told The Associated Press. "We obviously saw
the red flag."

Greece is seeking four prized pieces from the Getty for which the museum
paid $5.2 million in 1993, including a gold funerary wreath dating from 400
B.C., Mary Pandou, director of museums for the Greek culture ministry, told
the AP.

"We are observing the Italian case very closely," Pandou said. "I think the
entire world is watching."

In Ankara, Turkish government officials said Turkey was planning a fresh
initiative to recover antiquities.

A decade ago, Turkey appealed to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to return the
top half of an ancient statue of Hercules. The bottom half is in Turkey.

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