The Euphronios Krater

An Attic red-figure calyx-krater of about 515 BC, signed by Euxitheos as potter and by Euphronios as painter, showing the body of the Lycian prince Sarpedon lifted from the field of Troy by Sleep and Death while Hermes looks on. It is the only vase painted by Euphronios that survives complete, and by common consent one of the finest Greek vases in existence.

It is also the most consequential provenance case in the history of the antiquities market. Dug out of an Etruscan tomb at Cerveteri in December 1971 by tomb robbers, it passed through Giacomo Medici to the dealer Robert Hecht and reached the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 at a record price for an antiquity, carrying a Beirut ownership story that had been lifted off a different vase. A New York Times reporter attacked the story within months. It took another thirty-five years, a raid on a Geneva freeport warehouse, four thousand seized Polaroids and a dealer's own handwritten memoir to finish the argument.

The Metropolitan transferred title to Italy in February 2006 and handed the krater over in January 2008. It went first to Villa Giulia in Rome and then, in a decision that most accounts of the case still have not caught up with, to the small municipal museum at Cerveteri, four kilometres from the tomb it was taken from. The rules that now govern how American museums buy antiquities were written because of this pot.

The best surviving Greek vase was found by men working at night with a spade

The object is a calyx-krater: a bowl for mixing wine with water at a symposium, its lower body flaring out from the foot like the calyx of a flower. It stands 45.7 centimetres high, measures 55.1 centimetres across the mouth, and holds about forty-five litres. It is terracotta, decorated in the red-figure technique, in which the background is covered with a black slip and the figures are reserved in the colour of the clay, their interior detail drawn in with a raised relief line and washes of diluted slip.

Two things make it exceptional even among the finest Greek pottery. The first is that both men who made it put their names on it. The second is that it is intact. Euphronios is credited with something in the order of twenty-seven painted vases; every other one survives as fragments or as a partial reconstruction. This is the only complete one.

Everything else that can be said about how it came to be a known object begins in December 1971, on private land in the Greppe Sant'Angelo sector of the Etruscan cemetery at Cerveteri, ancient Caere, about forty kilometres north-west of Rome. There is no excavation record, no tomb plan, no inventory of what else was in the chamber and no photograph of the vase in the ground, because the people who took it out were not archaeologists.

Two signatures on one pot is a statement, not a formality

On the obverse the vase carries EUXITHEOS EPOIESEN and EUPHRONIOS EGRAPHSEN: Euxitheos made it, Euphronios painted it. The verbs matter. Epoiesen claims the throwing and firing of the vessel, egraphsen the drawing on it. The two roles were separate trades in the Athenian Kerameikos and were usually held by different men.

Painters signed occasionally, and normally only their best work. Potters signed less often still. Having both names on the same piece is close to a joint declaration that the two of them considered this the top of their output. It is the single most useful fact in the record, because it means the attribution of this object does not depend on the judgement of any modern scholar. For almost every other Attic vase it does.

The vase also carries, on both sides, the acclamation LEAGROS KALOS, Leagros is handsome. Leagros was the fashionable young Athenian of his moment, and the vogue for his name in these inscriptions is conventionally dated to the years 520 to 510 BC. That inscription, not any stylistic argument, is what dates the krater. Published dates cluster at about 515 BC, with about 510 BC also in the literature.

The picture is a state funeral for a foreign prince

The obverse shows the death of Sarpedon, son of Zeus and Laodameia, king of the Lycians and the most distinguished of Troy's allies, killed by Patroclus in the sixteenth book of the Iliad. Zeus cannot save him from fate, so he sends Apollo to lift the body out of the fighting, wash it, anoint it and hand it to Sleep and Death to carry home to Lycia for burial.

Euphronios paints exactly that transfer. Hypnos and Thanatos, winged and armoured, take the weight of the corpse between them; Hermes stands upright behind, in his function as conductor of the dead; two Trojan hoplites flank the group staring straight out, apparently unaware of what is happening between them. Every figure is labelled. Sarpedon's body is turned toward the viewer and blood runs from three wounds, in the left chest, the abdomen and the right thigh.

The reverse shows something else entirely: four youths arming and a bearded man already in full armour, five named Athenians contemporary with the painter and his customers, named but not heroic. The pairing is deliberate and it is the reason the vase has held its reputation for a century and a half. The mythological scene is drawn in the same idiom as the everyday one. Sarpedon was a youth like these, and Sleep and Death will come for them too. The reverse is also visibly quicker work, painted as the clay of a very large vessel dried and stiffened under the brush.

The Metropolitan paid a record price for an object that had been above ground for eight months

In February 1972 Robert E. Hecht, an American dealer resident in Rome, told Dietrich von Bothmer, the Metropolitan Museum's curator of Greek and Roman art, that the vase existed. In June, von Bothmer, the director Thomas Hoving and the deputy director Theodore Rousseau went to Zurich to look at it. It had been restored there by Fritz Buerki. In August, after some haggling, the museum agreed to buy.

The price is the first thing this record has to be careful about. The figure most often reported as agreed in August 1972 is one million United States dollars, a record for any antiquity. A second figure, 1.2 million dollars, circulates widely, attached to a date of 10 November 1972. That date is also, exactly, the museum's accession number for the object: 1972.11.10. This record does not treat either figure as settled and does not convert them. It was a private treaty purchase, not an auction; there is no hammer price and no buyer's premium to separate, and any dollar figure quoted elsewhere in inflation-adjusted terms is a derived number, not a historical one.

The museum did not pay out of general funds. It raised the money by deaccessioning its coin collection through Sotheby's, ultimately receiving close to 2.3 million dollars from the coin sales. The krater arrived in the United States on 31 August 1972 and was unveiled to the public in November.

The Beirut ownership story was a document transplant

Asked how he had come by it, Hecht said he was not the owner. He was acting on a ten per cent commission for a Lebanese dealer in Beirut, Dikran Sarrafian, whose father had acquired the vase in London in 1920 and who had sent it to Switzerland for restoration. Sarrafian supplied two letters, one of 10 July 1971 undertaking to deliver and expecting a million dollars, one of 9 September 1972 setting out the family history.

The story had a defensible shape and the museum defended it hard. After the press attacks of 1973 it produced a bank record showing that Sarrafian had been paid 909,000 dollars in Swiss francs on 25 October 1971, weeks before the December date the Italians gave for the dig. It gathered affidavits: the restorer Buerki said he had received fragments in August 1971, a Basel photographer said he had seen them in September 1971, and the Chicago collector Muriel Newman swore she had been shown fragments by Sarrafian in Beirut in 1964. Hoving, roughly six months after the purchase, sent a private detective to Zurich to firm the account up.

The problem was in the paperwork itself. Sarrafian repeatedly described what he had as a hatbox of fragments. The Metropolitan's krater is a complete vessel; nothing about it fits in a hatbox. By 1993 Hoving had reached the conclusion that there had been two Euphronios kraters, that Sarrafian's really existed and was a poor fragmentary thing, and that Hecht had detached its documents and fastened them to the intact vase from Cerveteri. The lesser krater subsequently surfaced with the Texas oil heir Nelson Bunker Hunt, was bought by Leon Levy and Shelby White in 1990, and was returned to Italy in 2010. Sarrafian himself died in a car crash in 1977 and was never questioned.

Hoving's private reaction on first seeing the invoice, as reported by Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, was that he laughed and said he bet Sarrafian did not exist. He also knew, and later wrote, that Beirut was the standard cover address for smuggled Italian material.

A reporter had it right within four months

On 19 February 1973 Nicholas Gage published in the New York Times an account of how the Metropolitan had acquired what it was calling the finest Greek vase there is. It was the first of a series that took the museum's official version apart on its internal inconsistencies. On 24 February Gage interviewed Armando Cenere, who said he had stood lookout for a group of tombaroli digging illegally at Cerveteri in late 1971, and who remembered being shown a fragment from the dig painted with the figure of a bleeding man.

That detail is worth pausing on. The distinguishing feature of the Sarpedon on this vase, the thing a lookout with no Greek and no art history would actually retain, is that the corpse bleeds from three wounds. Cenere described the picture without describing the picture.

It was not enough. There was no seized documentation, no cooperating dealer, no physical exhibit, and Italy at that point had no mechanism for pursuing a foreign museum that declined to be persuaded. The vase stayed in New York for another thirty-five years, and Hoving's own private nickname for it, the hot pot, became the chapter title in his memoirs.

The case was won in a warehouse, not a courtroom

On 13 September 1995 the Carabinieri art squad and the Swiss federal police raided a five-room storage unit of about two hundred square metres in the Geneva Freeport, registered to a company called Editions Services. One room was a cleaning and restoration laboratory; another was fitted out as a showroom. The unit belonged to Giacomo Medici.

It contained roughly 3,800 whole or fragmentary objects, more than 4,000 photographs and 35,000 sheets of paper. The photographs were largely Polaroids of objects that appeared to have come straight out of the ground, often in several states as restoration progressed. That archive is the reason dozens of repatriations happened over the following two decades: it let investigators match a piece on a museum plinth to a photograph of the same piece dirty and in pieces. Two of the images, apparently from May 1987, show Medici and Hecht standing beside the Euphronios krater in the Metropolitan Museum itself.

On 16 February 2001 the Carabinieri raided Hecht's apartment in Paris and took away a handwritten memoir. It contained two versions of how he had obtained the krater. In one he had it from Sarrafian, as he had always said. In the other he had it from Medici, out of a clandestine excavation of 1971. In June 2001 Marion True of the Getty told Italian investigators under oath that von Bothmer had once pointed out the location of the looted tomb on an aerial photograph; von Bothmer denied it.

The criminal outcomes were thin. Medici was convicted on 12 May 2005 and sentenced to ten years and a fine of ten million euros, the heaviest penalty ever imposed in Italy for antiquities offences; on appeal in July 2009 the trafficking count fell to the limitation period, the receiving and conspiracy convictions stood, and the sentence came down to eight years. True's trial ended without a verdict in October 2010 on limitation. Hecht's trial in Rome ended the same way on 16 January 2012, after six years and at the age of 91; he died three weeks later. The prosecutor Paolo Ferri said publicly that cases of this complexity could not be settled inside the limitation periods the law allowed.

The evidence never had to convince a judge about this vase. It only had to convince a museum board.

Italy did not sue. It made an offer the Metropolitan could not refuse

Philippe de Montebello, by then the Metropolitan's director, met Italian officials in November 2005 and initially held that the evidence was inconclusive; his stated standard was incontrovertible proof. He gave that standard up within months, remarking that he was not a lawyer and that even murder cases were not tried to that bar, and moved to a test of substantial or highly probable illegality. Of the krater he then said it was highly probable that it had been stolen from an Etruscan tomb.

The agreement was announced on 3 February 2006 and signed in Rome on 21 February by de Montebello and the Italian culture minister Rocco Buttiglione. The Metropolitan transferred title to twenty antiquities, the krater and a hoard of Hellenistic silver believed taken from Morgantina in Sicily among them. Italy waived civil and criminal action against the museum over the restituted objects and committed to a forty-year programme of cultural cooperation: rotating four-year loans of archaeological objects of equivalent quality, plus exchanges of students and staff and joint work on excavation, conservation and research.

Italy's legal position rested on a patrimony statute of 1939 vesting state ownership in objects of artistic, historical, archaeological or ethnological interest found in the ground, which makes their export without licence unlawful at the moment of discovery. The lever that actually moved the museums, though, was the threat of losing access to Italian loans altogether. The krater stayed on view in New York until early 2008, after the museum's new Greek and Roman galleries opened, which was itself part of the bargain.

It has gone home twice, and the second move is the one nobody reports

The krater arrived in Italy on 18 January 2008 and was unveiled in Rome the same day. It joined Nostoi. Capolavori ritrovati, an exhibition of sixty-seven or sixty-eight recovered objects at the Palazzo del Quirinale, inaugurated on 18 December 2007 by President Giorgio Napolitano and the culture minister Francesco Rutelli and open to the public from 21 December 2007 to 24 March 2008. It drew about seventy thousand visitors in its first fifty days and was extended. From there the krater went to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome, and press coverage of the period describes Villa Giulia as its permanent home.

It is not there. In December 2014 the krater was sent to the Museo Nazionale Cerite at Cerveteri for a temporary display marking ten years of UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Banditaccia necropolis. Attendance at that small museum rose by about seventy-five per cent; in the first nine months of 2015 it took 23,075 visitors against 22,164 for the whole of 2014, and the necropolis itself went from 49,770 for 2014 to 69,255 in nine months of 2015. On 7 November 2015 the culture minister Dario Franceschini announced that the regional museum directorate for Lazio had signed the act definitively transferring both the krater and the Euphronios kylix from Villa Giulia to Cerveteri, on the principle that the strength of Italy lies in the link between museums and their territory.

So the vase now sits in a castle-museum in the town it was stolen from, a few kilometres from the necropolis, next to a second Euphronios vessel that the Getty gave back in 1999. Any account that leaves it at Villa Giulia, or at the Metropolitan, is out of date by a decade or more.

What the case changed

Before this vase, an American museum could buy an unprovenanced antiquity on a dealer's assurance and treat the assurance as diligence. The Metropolitan did exactly that in 1972, in public, at a record price, with the director's own private suspicions on the record decades later.

The Association of Art Museum Directors adopted new guidelines on archaeological material with effect from 4 June 2008, abandoning an earlier rolling ten-year test in favour of a fixed threshold: a museum should acquire an object only where it can be documented outside its country of origin by 1970, the year of the UNESCO Convention on illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property. Where a member museum acquires something whose history after November 1970 is incomplete, it must post the object publicly to the AAMD Object Registry, which was created alongside the guidelines so that source countries, scholars and claimants can see what has been bought. Thousands of objects have been posted since.

The guidelines are voluntary, they bind only member institutions, and they set a documentary standard that a competent forger of provenance can still meet, as Hecht's document transplant demonstrates in advance. But the burden has moved. In 1972 a museum needed a reason to refuse an object. Since 2008 it needs a reason to accept one. The archives that produced this outcome, the Medici Polaroids and the later Becchina and Symes-Michaelides seizures, are themselves still closed, held in Rome, disclosed selectively through a handful of authorised researchers, with the AAMD asking that they be opened and Medici asserting copyright over his own photographs.

The vase is worth looking at for its own sake, and it repays it. But it earns its place in this archive because it is the object that made provenance a condition of purchase rather than a courtesy.