‘The finest Greek vase there is.’ The pride with which a new acquisition was announced in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin for autumn 1972 was, in retrospect, asking for trouble. Its sentiment might not be controversial: this book essentially supports the superlative claim. But proclaiming the splendour of the result deepened the shadows cast by the means of its achievement. The tale of how our vase was acquired by the New York museum, and why it was then ‘repatriated’ to Italy, is notorious. Some details remain irredeemably obscure. Nonetheless it seems worth making a synthesis – as follows.

The story could begin with a minor episode. A twelve-year-old boy is taken for his first visit to the grand archaeological museums in Berlin. It is 1930: Wall Street has hardly recovered from the ‘Great Crash’ of its stock market, while in Germany, National Socialism is becoming a significant political movement. But this young visitor from Thuringia is transfixed by the sight of a single Greek vase in one of the cabinets of the Antikensammlung. It is a large krater, decorated with scenes from an Athenian gymnasium: athletes caught in various poses, along with their trainer and junior attendants (Fig. 1). The vase is not signed, yet the museum label refers to an artist by name: ‘Euphronios’. The boy resolves there and then that he will become an archaeologist, and devote his life to studying such fascinating objects as this.

Fig. 1 Calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, reportedly found near Capua in the 1870s. An early work, c.520 BC. See also Fig. 18. H 34.8 cm (13.7 in). Berlin, Antikensammlung F 2180.

Ingrid Geske.

This is how Dietrich von Bothmer, long-serving curator of antiquities at the New York Metropolitan Museum, recounted the moment that shaped his career as an expert in Greek painted pottery. Se non é vero é ben trovato, as Italians would say – ‘if not true, then it ought to be’; or else, suppose the child to be the father of the man, and so the boy first enchanted upon seeing a splendid vase by Euphronios becomes the careful scholar who forsook professional caution in order to acquire a similar vase by the same painter – similar in shape, that is, yet even more outstanding in decoration. Either way, it is a sort of love affair – and goes some way to explaining the modern drama of the Sarpedon krater. Of the various protagonists in this drama, none was more passionately motivated than Dietrich von Bothmer.

His youthful ambition, along with his opposition to Nazism, took him first to Britain, then the United States. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1938 (when Germans were still eligible for that award), Bothmer became a student of J. D. Beazley, then Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford. So he apprenticed himself to the world’s acknowledged supreme expert on ancient Greek vase-painting – and developed, by his own admission, into a devoted disciple. Not only did he learn Beazley’s methods for attributing even anonymous paintings to specific ‘hands’, and gain a mastery of these methods that would enable him, before long, to become the expert’s most trusted collaborator, but he also showed a particular flair for reuniting ‘orphans’ with their ‘family’ – that is, seeing how fragments of a single vase, even when scattered across different continents, could be pieced together. The interruption of war brought emigration to America, where Bothmer continued his studies first at Berkeley (under H. R. W. Smith, also a former Beazley student), and subsequently at Chicago, before volunteering for military service in the Pacific. Demobbed (with distinction), he resumed the vocation of scholar and connoisseur. Though an ocean lay between them, he maintained a steady correspondence with Beazley in Oxford, exchanging notes, sketches and photographs, and it became their custom to arrange an annual meeting.

Among Beazley’s early works is a monograph entitled Attic Red-Figured Vases in American Museums (1918). This carried a dedication to Edward Warren and John Marshall, saluting ‘their unwearied labour in building up the magnificent collection of vases in America’. Warren, the son of a paper-mill magnate, began using his inheritance to buy classical antiquities while still a student, visiting Rome. Marshall, his companion, would be hired by the New York Metropolitan Museum as its ‘European agent’ for the acquisition of classical antiquities. Marshall undertook that office in 1906, at a time when the Metropolitan Museum possessed very few Greek vases. By the time of his death, in 1928, Marshall had achieved remarkable results. Curator Gisela Richter – who appointed Bothmer as assistant curator at the Met in 1946 – could declare that, over two decades, ‘a collection was formed which is not only representative of the chief periods of Athenian red-figure but which ranks as one of the finest in the world’.

If only it could include Euphronios. The fact remained that American museums possessed very little of the painter’s work. Frank Tarbell, director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1888–9, had acquired some sherds, which eventually passed to the University of Chicago. In 1910, the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston had purchased a number of antiquities from Edward Warren, including several pieces of a psykter (wine-cooler: see p. 87) that Beazley attributed to Euphronios. Said to have come from the Etruscan site of Orvieto, this vase, even in its fragmentary state, showed an artistic ambition to orchestrate emotive scenes within the limited space of a curved vessel (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Detail of a psykter attributed to Euphronios. The deranged King Pentheus, already bleeding profusely, is gripped on each side by two maenads (one named, perhaps ironically, Galene, ‘Calm’); other maenads are rushing around the vase. H 12.8 cm (5 in). Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 10.221a–f.

Fig. 3 Fragmentary calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, with scenes of a symposium. The piping figure is labelled Syko (‘Fig’); the reclining drinker with frontal face, Thoudemos; the handsome youth gesticulating from his couch, ‘Smikros’ (‘Tiny’). (The hair and facial features of this figure closely match those of Sarpedon – see Fig. 78). H 44.5 cm (17.5 in). Munich, Antikensammlungen 8935.

Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München/Renate Kühling.

Opportunities to acquire works of such archaic interest and quality seemed unlikely to multiply. Then, in the early 1960s, a partial calyx-krater attributed to Euphronios, showing scenes of a drinking-party or symposion, was brought to academic attention by the Boston-based classical archaeologist Emily Vermeule (Fig. 3). Noting gratefully that the fragmentary vessel had been loaned first for an exhibition at Providence, Rhode Island, and subsequently to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Vermeule remained discreet concerning the owner’s identity. As for the likely provenance of the vase, she made no direct comment, merely observing – from signs of wear on the rim, and an ancient repair to its surviving handle – that ‘the krater probably enjoyed constant use as a show piece at Etruscan banquets before being consigned to the tomb’. The vase eventually passed into the holdings of Munich’s Staatliche Antikensammlungen in 1969 – by which time it had been ‘certificated’, as it were, within the oeuvre of Euphronios. Sir John Beazley (knighted in 1949, and subsequently made a Companion of Honour in 1959, for his services to scholarship) had already included it as an addendum to the second edition of his Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (1963). In the laconic style he used for these compendious catalogues, Beazley simply gave the provenance of the krater as ‘Philadelphia market’, and added: ‘Attributed by Hecht’.

In his preface to the same book, Beazley acknowledged the assistance he had received from two individuals – for their ‘kind acts’, ‘and for bringing to my notice vases that would otherwise have escaped me’. One was Herbert Cahn, proprietor of a family firm in Basel dealing in ancient coins and artefacts. The other was Robert (‘Bob’) Hecht. Like Cahn, Hecht had studied classical archaeology seriously before taking up trade in antiquities during the 1950s. A former Fellow of the American Academy at Rome, he became domiciled in that city, and used it as a base for business with museums and collectors around the world. Though remembered as a ‘suave’ and ‘worldly’ operator, Hecht could also be indiscreet: in 1962, for example, his excitement about some coins he had acquired in Turkey led him to examine them on an internal flight: witnessed doing so, and challenged by police at Istanbul airport with attempting illegal export, he was thereafter banned from returning to the country. In Italy, the previous year, he had been charged (along with Herbert Cahn, and others) on suspicion of dealing in stolen goods. Acquitted on that occasion, he prospered, supplying such respectable institutions as the British Museum and the Louvre; and making occasional visits to Oxford, where he shared photographs of freshly discovered Greek vases with Beazley.

Where were these Greek vases coming from? Not, normally, from Greece as such: as we shall see (p. 46), as a result of various historical and archaeological factors, such vases tend to be recovered from the tombs of the Etruscans – the ancient inhabitants of that part of Italy once defined as ‘Etruria’. The Etruscan heartlands – a territory located, broadly speaking, between Rome and Florence – are estimated to contain around half a million tombs. Many of those tombs lie beneath the surface of land in agricultural use; many of them were long ago emptied of their contents, comprising the ‘grave goods’ that the Etruscans were accustomed to deposit with their dead. Tomb raiders in ancient and medieval times would have been searching for jewellery, or any metallic items. Since the late eighteenth century, however, pottery was also regarded as worth finding. Accordingly, modern-day inhabitants of Etruscan areas became ingenious at probing for burials. No sophisticated sensing devices were required: a long steel rod, the spillone – pointed at one end, with a handle at the other for drilling it into the ground – was usually sufficient to locate a potential hoard. Practitioners of the pursuit – known as tombaroli, or clandestini – worked usually under the cover of darkness. Typically, they were local farmhands or labourers, apprenticed in boyhood as rogue archaeologists, and sheltered by endemic Italian distrust of state authority, whether represented by the military police (carabinieri) or archaeological superintendencies – the latter swift to annexe land deemed archaeologically important, and not so swift to compensate farmers for land annexed. Fields, pastures and volcanic escarpments around the prime centres of South Etruria – Tarquinia, Vulci, Veii and Cerveteri – were generic findspots. Some tombaroli claim to have emptied, over years of activity, thousands of tombs.

There was a time when spoils from the tombs (or carefully encrusted replicas of such spoils) were put on sale in Rome, at the Porta Portese flea-market, or in the shop-windows of dealers, such as Fallani’s on the Via del Babuino. (Not so nowadays, for reasons that will become obvious.) This was certainly the case when Hecht began his career. How he laid hands upon the Euphronios vase that he sold to Munich in the 1960s is not clear – but it is significant that he was later able to supply the same museum with further pieces of that vase, up until 1988.

With demand eager, it made sense (for Hecht) to pursue the possibility that further works by Euphronios lay waiting to be recovered from Etruscan tombs. Any problems of direct liaison with the localized gangs of tombaroli were eased when, in the mid-1960s, Hecht became acquainted with Giacomo Medici. Medici was the son of a minor antiquities vendor who kept a stall in Rome’s Campo Marzio. Father and son had already been charged with trading in looted objects, a protracted trial ending in short suspended prison sentences. Medici junior thereby learned to keep his activities more covert and selective. Rather than stand outdoors in Piazza Borghese, selling assorted detritus from antiquity to passing tourists, it was safer, and more lucrative, to specialize in procuring ‘top-end’ objects from the clandestine hauls in Etruria and elsewhere. Medici knew where and how the tombaroli worked; his clients, to begin with, were private collectors in Italy. Hecht brought a much wider dimension to the business, connecting not only with international museums and collectors, but also with academic experts. Beyond Beazley (whom Hecht would refer to as ‘Jackie D.’), these experts included Oxford-based scientists who had developed the technology of measuring residual thermoluminescence in pottery (and other materials), thereby providing assurance of authenticity.

The Hecht–Medici alliance began with an Athenian red-figure drinking cup. This was sold to a collector in Switzerland, for considerably more than Hecht had paid to Medici – so Hecht was happy; in turn, Hecht had paid Medici considerably more than Medici had paid the tombaroli – so Medici was happy; and Medici would have paid the tombaroli considerably more than they usually earned in a month, or even a year, in their ‘day jobs’ – so they were happy too. Such was the economic chain set up for the transfer of an ancient object out of Italy. For Hecht and Medici, this marked the beginning of a collaboration that endured for several decades, and encompassed a large quantity and variety of artefacts, including numerous pieces of Etruscan terracotta temple decoration, portions of wall-paintings cut away from Etruscan tombs, precious metalwork and more. Switzerland was a favoured place for making sales, and some notable buyers and dealers, such as Herbert Cahn and Elie Borowski, were based there; but final destinations were worldwide, and Etruria not the only source. In 1970, for example, Hecht paid Medici $67,000 for assorted relics from a tomb ransacked on a hill near Montelibretti, overlooking the Tiber valley: these were the grave goods of a ‘Sabine prince’, including gold-relief panels and horse-trappings from the royal ceremonial gig – and were sold on by Hecht to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen for $240,000.

Greek vases, however, were favoured stock-in-trade. A good idea of what Medici was able to supply, with or without Hecht as intermediary, may be gained from the catalogue of a sale at Christie’s, New York, in June 2000 – the collection of Elie Borowski, comprising 157 pieces, of which 146 lots were sold – for a total of $7,053,906. Even fragments could be valuable: so long as enough of the original decoration survived for an attribution to be made. The Beazley method of attribution (outlined in more detail on p. 53) only required a few diagnostic elements to secure a painter’s identity – some typical flourish of drapery, or telling anatomical hieroglyph, such as an ankle-bone – so long as one had the required experience and expertise. Not many archaeologists could claim as much; but one of the few was, as previously noted, Dietrich von Bothmer. Put in charge of the Department of Greek and Roman Art at the Met in 1959, he was already acquainted with Hecht, and practised his attribution skills by making minor purchases. Most of these were fragments – always useful for teaching purposes, if not ‘orphans’ in need of adoption – and most were for his private collection. To buy a major piece on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum was not something he could do alone.

For any museum official, the risks of purchasing antiquities without demonstrable provenance were well known at the time. Both John Marshall and Gisela Richter had been famously duped by several fake Etruscan terracotta statues, purchased by the Met between 1915 and 1921 (one at a cost of $40,000). It was under Bothmer’s watch, in 1961, that the Met eventually acknowledged these figures as forgeries. (Even from pictures, the modernity seems blatant – though perhaps that is just benefit of hindsight.) But were certain acquisitions worth the risk? A palpable spirit of rivalry prevailed, especially among institutions in the New World (and in particular during the 1970s, as the private antiquities collection of oil magnate J. Paul Getty began to be transformed into a public museum). In 1967 the Met had gained an aggressive new director, Thomas Hoving, a self-confessed self-publicist who liked to project events at the museum as front-page news, even if it meant ‘making the [Egyptian] mummies dance’. His approach to museum holdings was shamelessly commercial: an object was worth acquiring so long as it compelled the public to come, in droves, to see it.

Exactly what happened with the excavation of the Sarpedon krater, and its sale to the Metropolitan Museum in 1972, has probably gone to the grave with its protagonists. Dietrich von Bothmer and Thomas Hoving both died in late 2009, and Bob Hecht passed away in 2012, just a few weeks after his trial for dealing in looted antiquities came to an inconclusive end (by statute of limitations). A seven-strong team of tombaroli (plus two lookouts) is reckoned to have been involved in finding the vase: most of them, too, are now deceased, and in any case, none of them was ever likely to break the traditional Italian code of loyal silence (omertà) among thieves.

So far as events can be reconstructed, it seems that the krater was found one night in December 1971, as raiders were probing an overgrown cliffside below the site of the Etruscan city of Caere, or Cerveteri, about half an hour’s drive north from Rome. The area is known as the Greppe Sant’Angelo: not far from the sprawl of the modern town, and somewhat overgrown, it retains a clear view over the Vaccina valley and a route leading inland. (Fig. 4). Following the mythical precedent of some other modern archaeological discoveries, such as the cave-paintings of Lascaux, the tombaroli liked to say that they came across a tomb while hunting wild boar. More likely, they knew that the area formed part of a cordon of cemeteries around the Etruscan city, and as such was good hunting-ground for ancient treasures (see p. 46).

It took repeated sessions of digging to break into the grave complex (a series of connected chambers) where the vase was contained, and then to clear it. Whether the structure of the tomb was already collapsed, or collapse was caused by the intrusion, is obscure. For the intruders, a clearance was all that was intended. None of those involved was interested in delicate stratigraphy, or taking notes, or collecting any of the information that proper archaeologists would wish to have. This, essentially, is the scientific disaster caused by the illicit antiquities trade. However, we have reports regarding another object recovered from the same tomb – to the effect that along with the Sarpedon krater, there was also a drinking cup, or kylix, by Euphronios: and this kylix also showed the transport of the body of Sarpedon (see Figs. 37 and 38). Dubious as it is, the information potentially carries fascinating implications about ancient Etruscan ownership (see p. 53).

Fig. 4 Structures in the Greppe Sant’Angelo necropolis, Cerveteri, where the Sarpedon krater was allegedly found. The site lies in the southeastern lee of the plateau on which ancient Caere stood. The visible facades of the necropolis belong mostly to mock-palatial tombs created in the late fourth and third centuries BC.

As for the krater, it remains uncertain whether it was shattered by the manner in which the tombaroli forced their way into its place of deposition; and it is unfortunate that there is no reliable account of where it was located in the tomb-structure. Had it been left with other grave goods on the floor of the chamber, or resting upon a carved couch – or was it (as Hecht heard) recovered from the tomb’s corridor-entrance (dromos)? It is not inconceivable that the vase was actually found intact, then deliberately broken up to facilitate the smuggling process – although no one has ever admitted as much. In any case, its fifty or more pieces were bagged up and duly shown to Giacomo Medici, who did not hesitate to make a cash payment of some 50 million lire (about $88,000). He took some Polaroid shots of the fragments before transferring them to a safe-deposit box in Lugano, just across the Italian–Swiss border. Then he alerted Robert Hecht. The snapshots were sufficient to prompt an immediate response. Hecht made the journey to Lugano, liked what he saw, and made a deal with Medici for 1.5 million Swiss francs, or $350,000. He paid an advance, with the rest to come by instalments, and immediately took the fragments to Zürich for reassemblage by Fritz Bürki, a former university technician whose skill and discretion could be trusted. Then he went off for a family Christmas skiing holiday.

‘And a happy vacation it was.’1 On his return, Hecht cast around for potential buyers, while Bürki worked on restoring the vase. As it happened, his first sale of a vase had been made to the Metropolitan Museum, back in 1950, when Dietrich von Bothmer was junior to Christine Alexander. That vase was a handsome Apulian krater decorated with a rare image of a statue being painted, for which the Met paid $10,000. According to Hecht, Bothmer on that occasion declared that his (Hecht’s) vocation was ‘to ferret out the good objects worthy of collecting’. The Cerveteri find surely counted as one such. Hecht’s initial sales pitch, conveyed in a teasing and elliptical letter, was calculated to fascinate the New York expert. What if a vase of similar dimensions to one listed by Beazley – the ‘Herakles and Antaios krater’ in the Louvre (see Fig. 13) – and ‘in PERFECT condition’ were available? A subsequent letter maintained the enigmatic style, except in one respect: the asking price. This was not just any old Greek ‘pot’. It should be classified as if it were a masterpiece by Monet – and valued accordingly. (One of Hoving’s first controversies at the Met was his purchase of Monet’s Garden at Sainte-Adresse for $1.4 million.)

Bothmer was duly intrigued – but knew that Hoving would have to be equally intrigued for a purchase to result. Hecht travelled to New York, and showed them some photographs. Then Bothmer and Hoving, along with the Met’s deputy director Theodore Rousseau, took a flight to Zürich to see for themselves. It was now June of 1972, and with a few final touches from Bürki the vase would be completely restored.

In his account of the visit, published two decades later, Hoving admits his spontaneous ‘total adoration’ for the vase, as encountered in a Swiss suburban garden. It showed, he said, everything that he admired in a work of art: ‘[it is] flawless in technique, is a grand work of architecture, has several levels of heroic subject matter, and keeps on revealing something new at every glance’. Hoving describes Bothmer as ‘dumbstruck’ by the vase; as for himself, he recalled, ‘at the split second I first looked at it, I had vowed to myself to get it’.

Hoving suspected from the outset that the vase had been ‘illegally dug up in Italy’, Bothmer must have shared that suspicion. But neither of them pressed Hecht about the provenance: clearly, they did not want to know too much. Interviewed in 1997, Bothmer said that if the vase had been marked with an Etruscan inscription, he would not have bought it, because ‘then it would have been obvious that it came from Etruria’.2 Hecht’s first remark about provenance was made as a joke (he said the vase had belonged to his Finnish grandmother). Yet his non-joking cover story must have seemed thin and unconvincing to anyone seasoned in classical archaeology. According to Hecht, the vase had appeared in a shoebox (or a hatbox: consistency of such details was lacking), from the collection of an elderly Armenian antiquities merchant called Dikran Sarrafian (or Sarafian), based in Beirut. Sarrafian had provided Hecht with written testimony that the pieces had belonged to his family since the First World War. Subsequently, the same Sarrafian recalled that his father had acquired a box full of fragments in London, in 1920 [sic], ‘in exchange for a collection of gold coins from the Near East’.

Hecht claimed to be acting on behalf of Sarrafian, and implied that his client wanted a good price – from which he (Hecht) would take a 10 per cent commission. What was a good price? Nothing less than a million dollars. How should the Met find such money? Thomas Hoving, who had recently ‘de-accessioned’ paintings by van Gogh and Henri Rousseau from the collection, wondered if there were some Greek sculptures he could trade. By Hecht’s account, Bothmer revealed that there was already an intention of selling off the Met’s holdings of thousands of Greek and Roman coins. Hecht advised using Sotheby’s; Hoving and Bothmer acted accordingly, and secured a cash advance ($1.6 million, says Hecht) from the auction house. The Roman gold coins were sold in November 1972, and the Greek silver in April 1973, netting several millions. (Though some protests ensued, the strategy was not hugely controversial: since 1909, ancient coins had been the preserve of the American Numismatic Society, not the Met.)

Flying out with Hecht from Switzerland in a first-class seat of its own, the fully restored vase cleared US Customs in New York at the end of August. Hecht declared its value at a million dollars, and was duly remitted that sum. Bothmer was absolutely confident of the krater’s authenticity, and regarded a thermoluminescence test as unnecessary. Hoving could not restrain his glee when announcing his latest ‘capture’ (in his memoirs he confesses ‘a near-sexual pleasure’). ‘The histories of art will have to be rewritten’, he claimed, as for the very first time a work of art featured on the front cover of the New York Times Magazine (issue of 12 November 1972). The Sarpedon krater was displayed in a transparent cabinet of its own, designed by an expert from Tiffany’s; it stood in the centre of a gallery, so that visitors could appreciate its quality from all angles. A press photograph showed Dietrich von Bothmer at his desk; spread before him were pictures of the vase he would publish in the museum’s quarterly magazine, a special issue about Greek vases. The curator was not given to hyperbole by nature, but he too was patently delighted, and irrepressibly sure of the krater’s academic importance (Fig. 5). Hence the opening line of his initial publication: ‘In the field of painted Greek pottery, it may without exaggeration be considered the finest Greek vase there is.’

Fig. 5 Dietrich von Bothmer at the New York Metropolitan Museum, with the Sarpedon krater close to hand, autumn 1972. The Beazley method of attribution was based on close examination – yet, in Bothmer’s phrase, ‘one only truly sees with the heart’.

Bothmer, in his advisory report to the Acquisitions Committee of the Met, had forecast that the krater ‘would bring us the recognition that is our constant aim to achieve’. But – as he and Hoving might have anticipated – there was a toll to be paid for all the publicity. Journalists and commentators wanted to know how the museum had come by such an extraordinary object; and, naturally, how much it had cost. When the answers to those questions were not forthcoming, informal investigations began. The cost was easy enough to discover, by checking the records of US Customs. The provenance was intriguingly mysterious: as one reporter noted, the vase had apparently been conjured ‘out of thin air’. Hoving at first insisted upon secrecy for the sake of future possible dealings; but since rumours were already circulating about an illicit Italian origin, it became necessary to divulge the name of Dikran Sarrafian – and accordingly to produce some substantiation of the Lebanese story concocted by Hecht.

Hoving’s regular sobriquet for the krater – ‘the hot pot’ – may have been coined as a quip, but its criminal implications did not diminish over time. Matters were not clarified when in 1974 he received (so his memoirs report) a letter from a woman in Chicago who attested that she and her husband had visited Dikran Sarrafian in Beirut a decade earlier and were shown a box containing fragments of a Greek vase. Confusingly, Hoving gives the name of this woman as ‘Muriel Silberstein’: she was, rather, Muriel Steinberg Newman, well known as a collector of Abstract Expressionist art (and who in 1980 donated much of her collection to the Met). Even more confusingly, Hoving then became sure that Sarrafian had possessed pieces of a krater by Euphronios – but, being incomplete, this had to be another krater. In his published memoirs, Hoving revealed what he thought had happened. Bob Hecht had acquired some fragments of a krater by Euphronios, long held by Dikran Sarrafian, back in 1971. Then came the find at Cerveteri, a year or so later, of the Sarpedon piece. To assist his sale of the latter, Hecht introduced paperwork from his previous transaction with Sarrafian: simple as that. Since a second (and fragmentary) krater by Euphronios had indeed recently come onto the market, Hoving considered the mystery solved.

Putting aside the peculiar letter from ‘Muriel Silberstein’ (probably now unverifiable, since Muriel Newman died in 2008), the muddle of Hoving’s account is compounded by mention of a third Euphronios vase: not a krater, but a drinking cup or kylix, also on offer from Hecht, and also representing Sleep and Death with the corpse of Sarpedon. Bothmer was keen to acquire it – but by now Hoving wanted nothing more to do with Euphronios, or perhaps any Greek vases at all: ‘the hot pot’ was only getting hotter. We shall return to the kylix in a later chapter (see p. 146); as for the second krater, which Hoving supposed to be ex-Sarrafian, we may note that it entered the antiquities collection of the Hunt brothers, Texan commodities-billionaires (as did the kylix, c.1980). Certainly it comprises fragments that might once have fitted into a modest-sized box. But evidence would eventually surface to prove that this vase, too, had been looted from Cerveteri.3

Hecht, in his ‘autobiographical’ memoir, claims that he felt happy to have secured a price for the vase that would provide for Dikran Sarrafian in old age. But how much recompense – if any – went to Sarrafian is not known. In 1977, both Sarrafian and his wife were killed in what Hoving refers to as ‘a mysterious car crash’, in Beirut. Meanwhile, Italian authorities were intensifying their search for evidence to demonstrate the truth of rumours that the Sarpedon krater had come from a tomb at Cerveteri. As it happened, a parcel of land by the Greppe Sant’Angelo site had come up for sale in autumn of 1972 – and it had been bought by one Giacomo Medici, with a colleague who ran an antiquities outlet in Switzerland. Ostensibly the pair intended to set up a pork farm. There was a surreal period during which an official archaeological team, headed by Giuseppe Proietti, was joined in exploring the site not only by officers of the carabinieri, but Medici too. This was in the summer of 1974.

The previous year, Medici’s elder brother Roberto had ‘disappeared’, along with an accomplice, while in Naples on antiquities-related business: his burnt-out car was all that police ever found of him. The value of Greek vases now attracted some serious criminals. And the record price set by the Sarpedon krater had another effect. The local tombaroli had each received something like $8,500 for the vase. To learn that it had subsequently fetched $1,000,000 was galling. It seems that in vengeful spirit, one of their number decided to assist criminal investigations by supplying the carabinieri with an anonymous letter denouncing himself. When officers interviewed this Armando Cenere – who had already talked to journalists – he told them that he had not been directly involved in digging the tomb at the Greppe Sant’Angelo, only acting as lookout. (So perhaps he did not break the rules of omertà.) As lookout, however, Cenere caught a glimpse of the painted pottery brought up from the tomb – and when shown a photograph of the krater, he claimed to recognize the image of ‘a man bleeding’ as seen one night in December 1971. Cenere also pointed investigators in the direction of Hecht. His testimony was enough to encourage Italian authorities to commence the process of legal proceedings. But the country’s criminal justice system is not known for its swift efficiency. By the time the case came to court at Civitavecchia, in autumn 1978, Dikran Sarrafian was dead, Hoving had stepped down as director at the Met – and Armando Cenere could no longer swear to his memory of events. The judge declared insufficient proof for prosecution.

Meanwhile, Robert Hecht had quitted Rome for Paris. Giacomo Medici also moved, to base himself in Geneva. Neither of them, however, abandoned the antiquities trade. The Met continued to purchase, as did the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston; while on the West Coast of the USA there was an institution with an annual spending budget of c.$80 million, and a curator keen to buy classical material of all sorts. This was Jiri Frel, who prior to joining the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu in 1973 had spent a year at the Met – long enough for Thomas Hoving to judge him as ‘a shifty, troublesome guy’ who ‘sullied… the entire museum profession’ (the adage it takes one to know one comes to mind). Frel may be chiefly remembered for the purchase of a large-scale forgery (‘the Getty kouros’), and as architect of a tax-evasion scheme whereby wealthy individuals purchased antiquities, had them valued at hyperbolic prices, then gave them to the Getty – offsetting the donation against their dues to the Internal Revenue Service. During his time at Malibu, however, Frel enthusiastically (and with some personal expertise) built up the Getty’s holdings of Greek vases. By 1983 he had the confidence to launch a publication entitled Greek Vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum. International scholars were invited to publish the new acquisitions. This was a service to the academic community, undoubtedly; yet it also, as a cynic might observe, provided a sort of intellectual ‘laundering’ of stolen goods. Frel’s declared sources for those goods ranged from the studiously vague (e.g. ‘European art market’) to the spuriously particular (e.g. ‘the Count Esterhazy’).

Frel was eventually arraigned and demoted for his misdemeanours; he left the Getty in 1986. But his strategies of acquisition lingered at the museum. With hindsight, it is clear that one particular assemblage of fragments heightened suspicion about illicit provenance. This was the enormous kylix discussed in an article by Dyfri Williams (then of the British Museum) in 1991. Congratulating the Getty upon possessing ‘one of Onesimos’s grandest cups’, Williams began by establishing that although the foot of the vase once carried the inscription EUPHRONIOS EPOIESEN, ‘Euphronios made [this]’, here the Euphronios who painted the Sarpedon krater was signing as potter, not painter. The style of the painting belonged to his (presumed) pupil, Onesimos – a prolific vase-painter who in pious prosperity appears to have offered seven marble basins to Athena on the Acropolis during the early fifth century BC. Euphronios, as potter, is credited with developing and perfecting a distinct type of ‘jumbo cup’ that was wide in diameter and shallow in depth: not at all practical for the purpose of drinking, surely, but offering extra space for painted decoration (see p. 53). As Williams showed, Onesimos exploited the extra space ingeniously, showing on the cup’s exterior surface two episodes from Homer’s Iliad – the handmaiden Briseis led away to Agamemnon, a cause for ‘the wrath of Achilles’; also, apparently (the scene is incomplete), the duel between Ajax and Hector – and, within the cup, a complex evocation of the Ilioupersis or ‘Fall of Troy’. Beyond its size, however, and the grand narrative scope of its decoration, the vase was distinguished by an unusual feature. Scratched within the recess of its base there runs an Etruscan inscription (Fig. 6). The Etruscan language may have its obscure aspects, and only half of the original base survives, but the gist of this graffiti is not difficult to understand: ‘This vase was dedicated by [? – the name is missing] to Hercle.’

‘Hercle’ is the Etruscan for Herakles (the Roman Hercules), who as hero and deity was venerated across the Mediterranean. Latin sources speak of a fons Herculis, a spring sacred to Herakles, at Cerveteri. The precise variant of Etruscan script used in the dedication was identified as characteristic of Cerveteri. Dyfri Williams did not comment on these associations; the reception of the vase was not within the scope of his discussion, and the implications of the inscription had already been noted by Jacques Heurgon and other Etruscan experts. But while the manuscript of his article was in press, Williams was shown photographs indicating that further fragments of the cup had appeared ‘on the market’, and he mentioned these by way of both an ‘Addendum’ and then a ‘Postscript’. The significance was clear enough. The kylix, which had been broken and then repaired in antiquity, came from Cerveteri – and ‘came’ in the imperfect tense.

Fig. 6 ‘Type C’ kylix, attributed to Onesimos as painter, and signed by Euphronios as potter. The interior of the cup shows, centrally, Neoptolemos (the son of Achilles) attacking King Priam and his family by an altar to Zeus; and in a separate register, further scenes of the sack of Troy. Date c.500–490 BC. H 20.5 cm (8 in); d. 46.5 cm (18 in). Cerveteri, Museo Archeologico.

A campaign of digging in the Sant’Antonio area of Cerveteri, just above the Greppe Sant’Angelo, began in 1993. The present author was part of those excavations, and can remember the regular disheartening experience of leaving the site at the end of the day, and returning the next morning to find that it had been visited by clandestini during the night. It is hard to say how much was pilfered. A favourite trick of the visitors was to bury a cigarette packet for us to find. But at least the architectural structures of two adjacent temples were brought to light; and one votive indication of a cult to Herakles (a small bronze club) was sufficient to compound local rumours that the large cup in the Getty had once been dedicated in this vicinity. One of the team, Maria Antonietta Rizzo, who was then archaeological superintendent for the Cerveteri area, aired allegations about the origins of the kylix at an international conference held in Viterbo during 1997, a meeting where Marion True, curator of antiquities at the Getty since 1986, happened to be present. The emotive pressure to restore Italy’s lost patrimonio culturale was overtly reinforced with the academic ideal of understanding ancient objects in their archaeological context. It is to Marion True’s credit that she responded immediately with an offer to return the kylix, if the Italian authorities would submit their information about its origins. A dossier of evidence was prepared – and the vase returned to the custody of the Italian state in February 1999.

Back in 1972, the Sarpedon krater had been tagged ‘the million-dollar vase’. Its fame, by price, had since been eclipsed by more than one ancient Greek pot. At a Sotheby’s sale in 1990, the fragmentary krater by Euphronios showing Herakles and Kyknos, owned by the Hunt brothers, was sold (to New York-based collectors Shelby White and Leon Levy) for $1,760,000. The Hunts’ Sarpedon kylix by Euphronios was also sold at the same auction, for $742,000. Its purchaser was Giacomo Medici, who with a broad smile saw off a rival bidder (Robin Symes – acting for the Met) and became reunited with a vase that he had once supplied to Robert Hecht for a considerably smaller sum. Either he wanted it back, for love of Euphronios – or (more likely) he calculated that its capital value could only increase.

Perhaps even Medici sensed that an epoch of illicit digging was coming to a close. His own part in it was soon to end. ‘Nucleo TPC’, a special unit of the carabinieri, dedicated to catching and prosecuting all those involved in the illicit traffic of art and antiquities, had by now developed into an effective force.4 Collectors and museum staff beyond Italy were also in their sights. In the summer of 1995, Medici’s premises at Freeport Geneva were raided, yielding fresh evidence about the various past transactions (in the course of the operation a Swiss policeman – in a scene worthy of Clouseau – managed to drop the Sarpedon kylix). Combined with material seized during the swoop upon Hecht’s Paris apartment, sufficient evidence was accumulated for criminal proceedings to be launched. Medici stood trial in 2003; True and Hecht were both indicted in 2005. Though they could be tried separately, all three were charged with conspiracy.

Thomas Hoving’s successor at the Metropolitan Museum was Philippe de Montebello. While legal processes in Rome took their course, with various appeals and procrastinations – Hecht and Medici were respectively past and approaching the age-limit for imprisonment in Italy, and charges against Marion True, who resigned from her Getty post in autumn 2005, were eventually dropped – evidence that the Sarpedon krater had been looted from a tomb in the Greppe Sant’Angelo necropolis of Cerveteri was undeniable. There were also a number of other objects among the New York museum’s recent acquisitions for which Italian authorities had gathered similarly incontrovertible proof of criminal origin, such as an ensemble of Hellenistic silver from Morgantina in Sicily. Montebello seized the initiative. Late in 2005, he made a proposal to the Italian government. It remained a moot issue, in terms of international law, as to whether the Metropolitan Museum could ever be obliged to give up the offending objects. Montebello suggested an ‘out of court settlement’ that might suit both parties. Acknowledging ‘past improprieties in the acquisition process’ – yet maintaining that purchases had been made ‘in good faith’ – the Met would give up its title to the krater by Euphronios, along with the silverware from Morgantina, and five further pieces of ancient Greek painted pottery, purchased variously between 1972 and 1999. For its part, the Italian Ministry of Culture – whose representatives included Giuseppe Proietti, a former director of the Villa Giulia, who had also been superintendent at Cerveteri in the 1980s – agreed to provide the Metropolitan with long-term future loans ‘of works of art of equivalent beauty and importance to those being returned’. Hailing ‘the appropriate solution to a complex problem’, Montebello was thereby able to reassure the Met’s visitors (and trustees) that there was, in effect, no resultant depletion of museum holdings – rather, the welcome prospect of hosting in New York a series of masterpieces otherwise confined to Italy.

By a sub-clause to this agreement, the Sarpedon krater was permitted to extend its sojourn at the Met for the inauguration of new Greek and Roman galleries. Then, in January 2008, the return journey was made, with due measure of triumphal pomp, to Rome (Fig. 7). A special exhibition of the vase in company with other archaeological ‘homecomings’, given the Greek title Nostoi, was immediately staged at the presidential Palazzo del Quirinale; thereafter, the krater went to the National Etruscan Museum at Rome, in the Villa Giulia, for permanent display.

Or so it was assumed. In December 2014 the vase was loaned, along with the grand kylix recovered from the Getty, to Cerveteri’s Archaeological Museum – a modest collection of local antiquities created in 1967 from the caserma pubblica, and in structure recalling a medieval dungeon. If the authorities at the Villa Giulia were expecting it back, they were thwarted. In November 2015, Italian Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini announced that, in accordance with a government strategy of allocating art-works to their places of origin, and diffusing tourism in Italy beyond principal cities, the Sarpedon krater, and the kylix signed by Euphronios as potter, would remain in Cerveteri. So ‘the million-dollar vase’, after all its modern adventures, now occupies a glass cabinet approximately half a mile away from the Etruscan cemetery where it was once intended – by its last ancient owner – to rest for eternity.

Fig. 7 The ‘homecoming’ of the Sarpedon krater to Rome, January 2008.

Dario Pignatelli/Reuters.

1 Quoting from a handwritten and apparently autobiographical memoir seized by French and Italian officers in late 2000 (or early 2001: various dates are given), when they raided the residence in Paris to which Hecht had relocated in 1974. With a preface added by Arthur Houghton, former Getty curator, the memoir has been partially and privately printed at the behest of Hecht’s widow; it is not however a straightforward personal confession, and does not offer a consistent story about Hecht’s involvement with the Sarpedon krater.

2 Nørskov 2002, 331.

3 The vase, now in the Villa Giulia, features a particular moment in the mythology of Herakles. The hero has dealt a mortal blow to the brigand Kyknos, who sinks to the ground; but central to the scene is Athena, her aegis outstretched, intervening to obstruct her fellow Olympian deity Ares – father of Kyknos, intent on avenging his son’s death (in one version of the episode, Kyknos transforms into a swan). There may have been a special interest in Herakles at Cerveteri, provenance of the Paris krater showing Herakles and Antaios: see p. 147.

4 TPC = ‘Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale’, ‘safeguarding Italy’s cultural inheritance’; formed in 1969, and given more extensive powers in 1992.