Some in the US museum world take the view that the
Italian authorities should take advantage of the apparent truce
By Mauro Lucentini
It has been just over a year since the end of the trial
in Rome against Marion True, the former Getty curator, for conspiracy to
receive illegally excavated antiquities, and more than a year since
someone at the public prosecutor’s office in Rome leaked to the New York
Times details of the preliminary proceedings against Michael Padgett,
curator of ancient art at Princeton University Art Museum, and the
formerly New York-based Italian antiquities dealer Edoardo Almagià (see
p16).
Since then, however, in contrast to the almost daily
battles once waged by the Italian authorities in the US, not so much as a
ripple has broken the waters of their relationship with US museums.
Does this mean that the Italian assault strategy is being reconsidered
and softened?
While many hope so here in the US, this is not the
view of Almagià’s defence lawyer in Rome, Carlo Giacchetti, who says
there “might be thousands” of reasons for this cessation in hostilities
and that he can’t detect any change of heart on the part of the
investigating officers.
The mere possibility that the threat of
court action could linger for months or years over the heads of Padgett
and Almagià, without any possible charges being explained to them, is
seen in the US not only as proof of the legendary slowness of the
Italian justice system, but also as a demonstration of undue
obfuscation.
Some in the US museum world take the view that the
Italian authorities should take advantage of the apparent truce not to
prepare a new campaign of restitution requests, but to re-examine, with
regard to foreign as well as internal affairs, legal processes and
methodologies that in the US seem irreconcilable with the constitution
of a free nation and even with democracy itself.
This squares
with the view of Jason Felch, one of the two Los Angeles Times
investigative journalists (the other being Ralph Frammolino), who
documented behind-the-scenes goings on at the True trial and who
subsequently, with the bestseller Chasing Aphrodite, brought the details
of the trial to the attention of a global public.
“This is a
critical moment for both parties,” Felch says. “The coming years will
determine whether the spirit of co-operation that now prevails might
amount not simply to an armistice, but all-out peace. The Italians must
resist the temptation to continue with their iron-fist approach which,
in the end, will cost them the public support in the US they have
enjoyed until now.”
As for the US museums, Felch thinks that
they have learned their lesson, and that from now on they will operate
with greater transparency and in a spirit of collaboration.
A
similar opinion is expressed by Michael Conforti, the director of the
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, and former president of the Association of Art Museum
Directors, who praised the agreements reached between Italy and museums
such as the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the
long-term loan of Italian objects. “My hope is that the punitive
mentality of the past, with episodes resulting above all from a
difference in values, does not come to cloud the new optimistic and
positive atmosphere that has been created,” he says. At the Met, a
curator who insisted on remaining anonymous says: “When relationships
between countries are fostered by curators, it works well; rather less
well when the lawyers get involved.”
Everyone is hailing the
exceptional success and mutual benefit of the agreements for the
long-term display of Italian artefacts in US museums, even if there are
those who maintain that Italian officialdom is yet to be persuaded of
the need to abandon the mentality of accumulating and hoarding art
objects as an end in itself, in favour of allowing a much freer
circulation of Italian cultural heritage throughout the world. “They
have to understand that art is Italy’s best ambassador,” says Ralph
Frammolino. “I went to see at the Metropolitan the five or six pieces
that Italy has given on long-term loan. Fine, but there should have been
20 pieces, and the Met would have been happy to devote a separate room
to them.”
The principal cases that the Italian government is
keeping open once again involve the Getty, over the bronze known in the
US as the Victorious Youth (and in Italy as the Atleta di Fano);
Princeton University Art Museum over a number of Etruscan pieces; and
the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio over an Etruscan jug or kalpis. All
three cases go back around ten years or more: ripe, perhaps, for a time
limit to be imposed on them, though possibly not “Marion True” style,
after a five-year-long trial and a career destroyed (that the time limit
was applied while the trial was under way is a particular peculiarity
that made an unfavourable impression on the Americans).
It is the
Princeton case that is now the main focus of attention, on account of
the high profile of Michael Padgett, a curator known in the art world
for his expertise and integrity and to whom several other senior figures
in US cultural life, including the former director of the Met, Philippe
de Montebello, have lent their support.
Neither Princeton
University, with which the museum is affiliated, nor the museum itself,
are taking a stand, given that the Italian action is ad personas—against
Padgett in person. But the prevailing mood might be inferred from the
publication in Alumni Weekly, the magazine of former Princeton students
(among whose number is the 59-year-old Almagià, Padgett’s Italian fellow
suspect), of a three-page interview in July with Almagià himself, in
which he unleashed a tirade against the whole Italian system. “They have
criminalised and destroyed the antiquities market,” he said, later
telling me that Italian politicians and prosecutors are abusing their
power, anti-democratic and violating the most basic property rights.
“You are immediately equated with a criminal nowadays by being a
collector,” Almagià declared. “American museums allow themselves to be
dictated to and blackmailed; […] they must fight back, making clear that
in America one operates out of respect for freedom.”
The writer is an Italian author and journalist based in New York
