Statue of a Victorious Youth

One of a very small number of life-size Greek bronzes to survive from antiquity, pulled out of the Adriatic in the summer of 1964 in the nets of a fishing boat working out of Fano. The fishermen were paid about 5,600 dollars. The statue was hidden in a field and then, by several accounts, in a priest's house, and it left Italy. In 1977 the J. Paul Getty Trust bought it for 3.95 million dollars from a Luxembourg company, and it has been in Los Angeles ever since.

Everything that has happened since turns on one sentence in an Italian criminal judgment. On 8 November 1970 the Court of Appeal in Rome quashed the convictions of the fishermen and the dealer Giacomo Barbetti because the prosecution had not established that the statue was found in Italian waters. That is a finding about the state of the evidence, not a declaration of clean title, and the Getty treated it as the latter. In May 2024 the European Court of Human Rights said so in terms, holding that relying on an acquittal for want of proof fell short of the diligence required and that the Getty had implicitly accepted the risk of confiscation without compensation.

Italian courts ordered the bronze forfeited in 2010, again in 2012, again on 8 June 2018 at Pesaro, and the Court of Cassation rejected the final appeal. The European Court found no violation of the Getty's property rights in that order. None of it has moved the statue. A forfeiture order is not a repatriation and not a conviction; enforcement depends on a request to the United States Attorney General made in 2019 under the mutual legal assistance treaty, which was still pending when the Strasbourg court gave judgment.

What it is, and why so few of them exist

A naked youth stands with his weight on his right leg, his right hand raised to set a wreath on his own head. The wreath is probably olive, and olive was the prize at Olympia, which is what identifies him as a victorious athlete rather than a god or a prince. The eyes were originally inlaid with coloured stone or glass paste and the nipples with copper, so the figure as made was polychrome in a way the corroded green surface now conceals entirely.

It survives to about 1.52 metres. The lower legs and the feet are gone. It is hollow cast, and because it is one of the very few life-size Greek bronzes to have come down to us at all, it carries an amount of technical information about ancient bronze casting out of proportion to its size.

Almost every large Greek bronze was melted down. Bronze is a raw material with a standing resale value, and a statue is a convenient billet. The handful that survive survive because they went into the sea: the Riace bronzes, the Antikythera youth, the Marathon boy, the Croatian Apoxyomenos, this figure. The sea is the reason there is anything to argue about, and it is also, as it turned out, the reason the argument has lasted sixty years.

The net, 1964

In the summer of 1964 the statue came up in the nets of an Italian fishing trawler working the Adriatic off Fano, on the Marche coast. The boat is recorded as the Ferruccio Ferri. Italian art dealers paid the crew about 5,600 dollars for it.

What happened next is the part that no document fixes precisely and that every account tells slightly differently. The dealer Giacomo Barbetti bought it and it was concealed: in a cabbage field, and afterwards in a priest's house, where one widely repeated version has it hidden in a bathtub. It was then sold on, in the ArThemis chronology to an unidentified buyer in Milan, and it changed hands more than once before it left the country.

Nobody wrote any of this down at the time, which is the ordinary condition of a find that is not declared. Under Italian law of the period, an antiquity found in Italian territory belonged to the state from the moment it was found. A crew that lands one and sells it for cash has not made a private sale; it has disposed of state property. Whether that law reached this object depends entirely on where the net was when it closed, and no one on the boat was taking a position.

The 1970 acquittal is the document this whole case runs on, and it is not a title deed

Between 1966 and 1970 the fishermen, Barbetti and others were prosecuted under Article 67 of Law No. 1089 of 1 June 1939, the Italian cultural property statute, for handling stolen property. On 8 November 1970 the Court of Appeal in Rome overturned the convictions. The stated grounds were that the prosecution had not established that the statue was discovered in Italian waters, and had not established that it was of artistic and archaeological interest.

Read that carefully, because the next fifty years depend on it. It is an acquittal for insufficiency of proof. It does not find that the statue came from international waters. It does not find that the statue is not of archaeological interest. It finds that the state failed to prove either proposition to a criminal standard against those particular defendants in 1970. An acquittal on the evidence is not a declaration that the opposite is true, and it certainly is not a conveyance of good title from the Italian state to whoever holds the object.

The Getty, on the advice of the vendor's lawyers, treated the 1970 judgment as clearing the statue for purchase. The European Court of Human Rights addressed that reasoning directly in 2024 and rejected it, holding that reliance on an acquittal that merely reflected insufficient evidence, rather than clear title, did not meet the high standard of diligence required of a major institutional buyer.

This is why the object belongs in this archive. The case is not a connoisseurship dispute and it is not really about Lysippos. It is about what a court document does and does not say, and about an institution that read a criminal judgment as a commercial warranty.

Munich, Luxembourg, Malibu

The statue surfaced in 1972 in Munich at the premises of the dealer Heinz Herzer. In 1974 Herzer sold it to Artemis, a Luxembourg corporation. In 1977 Interpol informed the Italian authorities that Artemis had sold the bronze to the J. Paul Getty Trust for 3.95 million dollars. It went on public display in 1978.

The sequence is not agreed in every detail. Wikipedia's account has the statue emerging under the ownership of the Artemis consortium in 1971 and being stored with Herzer, which reverses the order given in the Geneva Art-Law Centre chronology. Both agree on Herzer, on Artemis and on the 1977 sale price. This record does not arbitrate between them; the disagreement is recorded because it sits exactly where a provenance chain most often goes soft, between the dealer who holds an object and the corporate vehicle that sells it.

What is agreed and rarely emphasised is the year. The 1970 UNESCO Convention was three years old when the object reached Munich and seven years old when the Getty bought it. Italy had prosecuted people over this statue within living memory of the purchase, and Interpol was circulating the sale as it happened. The Getty did not buy in the dark.

The museum states the contested fact in its own tombstone

The J. Paul Getty Museum's published record for object 77.AB.30 begins its account of the object's history with a plain declarative: found in the sea in international waters. The rest of the entry is candid about how little is known. The origin of the statue is unknown; Olympia or the athlete's home town are both possible. Romans probably carried it off during the first century BC or AD, when Roman collecting of Greek art was at its height, and the ship carrying it may have foundered, which is what preserved it.

All of that is careful, hedged museum prose. The one thing stated without hedge is the single fact that Italian courts have refused to accept for fifty years and that the 1970 acquittal did not find. A visitor reading the label learns the legal conclusion the museum needs, presented as background.

This is worth recording precisely because it is not a forgery, a smuggler's story or a fake licence. It is a large, well-funded, professionally curated institution publishing a contested jurisdictional finding as a settled fact of provenance, in the one place where a general reader will take it on trust.

Twelve years of Italian procedure, in sequence

Italy's Minister of Cultural Heritage asked for the statue back in 1989. The Getty declined. In 2007 Italy and the Getty Trust concluded an agreement under which forty objects were returned and a programme of cultural cooperation was set up. The bronze was not in it. In the same year proceedings at the Tribunal of Pesaro concerning the illicit export lapsed on limitation.

That is where most narratives stop, and it is where the case actually begins. In 2009 the prosecutor at Pesaro asked instead for forfeiture, a remedy directed at the object rather than at any person. On 10 February 2010 the pre-trial judge at Pesaro ordered the statue forfeited. The Getty appealed. On 18 January 2011 the Court of Cassation sent the case back to Pesaro because the earlier appeal had been procedurally misqualified. On 3 May 2012 the pre-trial judge upheld the forfeiture order. The Getty appealed again. On 10 June 2014 the Court of Cassation referred constitutional questions to the Constitutional Court about the procedure being used. On 15 June 2015 the Constitutional Court held the relevant articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure unconstitutional and sent the matter back to Pesaro for a public hearing. On 8 June 2018 the Tribunal of Pesaro heard it in public, rejected the Getty's case and confirmed the forfeiture. The Court of Cassation then rejected the Getty's final appeal.

The date of that last decision is reported two ways. The Geneva Art-Law Centre gives 2 January 2019; Wikipedia gives November 2018. Both cannot be the date of the same act, and the discrepancy is the ordinary one between the hearing and the filing of an Italian judgment. This record does not guess which is which.

Nine judicial decisions in twelve years, two of them from the Court of Cassation and one from the Constitutional Court, and at the end of them the statue is exactly where it was in 1978.

Forfeiture, repatriation, settlement and conviction are four different things

The words are used interchangeably in press coverage of antiquities cases and they have nothing like the same consequences. This case contains three of the four and it is worth naming which is which.

Nobody has been convicted in relation to this statue. The only criminal convictions ever recorded, of the fishermen and Barbetti, were quashed in 1970, and the later Pesaro proceeding on illicit export expired on limitation in 2007. The 2007 agreement under which forty other objects went back to Italy was a negotiated settlement, and this object was excluded from it. What Italy holds is a forfeiture order: an order in rem, made against the thing, declaring it property of the Italian state and requiring its confiscation. It binds an Italian court. It does not by itself move an object that is in California.

A repatriation is what happens when a holder transfers an object, whether by agreement, by court order it chooses to obey, or by enforcement. None of those has occurred here. Italy asked the United States Attorney General's office to enforce the order in 2019 under the mutual legal assistance treaty between the two countries, and that request was recorded as still pending when the European Court gave judgment in 2024. American courts have not ruled on it.

So the correct statement of the position, as at this record's verification date, is that the statue is Italian state property as a matter of Italian law, remains in the lawful physical possession of the J. Paul Getty Museum as a matter of fact, and that no court in the jurisdiction where it sits has ordered anything.

Strasbourg, 2 May 2024

The J. Paul Getty Trust and fourteen American nationals lodged application no. 35271/19 against Italy on 28 June 2019, complaining that the confiscation order violated Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, the guarantee of peaceful enjoyment of possessions. The First Section of the European Court of Human Rights deliberated on 19 March 2024 and gave judgment on 2 May 2024, in a text running to 92 pages. It found no violation.

The reasoning matters more than the result. The Court accepted that the Getty had acquired a proprietary interest through more than forty years of continuous possession and that the confiscation order interfered with it. It then held the interference justified, on the ground that the Getty's conduct at acquisition had been negligent and possibly worse. Four failures were identified: relying solely on experts supplied by the vendor rather than commissioning an independent assessment; failing to contact the Italian authorities despite knowing there was a provenance problem; treating the 1970 acquittal as if it established title when it established only that the prosecution had failed; and falling short of the high standard of diligence expected in a transaction of that size. The Court concluded that the Trust had implicitly accepted the risk of confiscation without compensation. The Italian findings the Court reviewed were that the statue was protected by Italian cultural heritage and customs law, that it had been unlawfully exported, and that the Trust had bought it negligently in the absence of any export licence.

The compensation point is the sharpest part of the judgment for anyone in the market. Both the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention contemplate compensating an innocent possessor who exercised proper diligence. The Court noted that framework and then held that it did not rescue the Getty, because the diligence was not there. Buying carefully is not a formality that produces a paper trail; on this reading it is the condition of ever being paid anything if the object is taken.

Judge Wojtyczek appended a separate opinion, characterised in one account as partly dissenting and partly concurring and in another simply as a dissent; the operative holding is reported as unanimous. The judgment does not order the Getty to hand the statue over. It decides only that Italy's order does not breach the Convention, which leaves the object where it has been since 1978 and the order where it has been since 2010.

What a museum's diligence file is actually for

Read as a practical document rather than a human rights judgment, the 2024 decision is a specification for a purchase file, written by a court, using a real institution's failures as the negative example.

An expert opinion obtained by the seller is not diligence, because the seller chose the expert. A criminal judgment in the source country is not a title search, because criminal courts decide whether the prosecution proved its case and not who owns the object. Not asking the source country is not neutrality, because the question of whether a state claims an object is answered only by asking the state. And the standard rises with the price: the Court expressly tied the level of diligence required to the scale of the transaction.

None of those propositions is novel to anyone who has run a title search on a building. What is novel is that a court has now applied them to an art purchase and attached the consequence: the buyer who skipped them can be stripped of the object and is not entitled to be paid for it.

Fano, and what a town is claiming

The statue is known in Italy as the Atleta di Fano, and the town has campaigned for its return for decades, to the point that the object is often referred to locally as simply Lisippo. That is a claim built on an attribution the holding museum does not itself assert, to an object that, on all accounts, was never made in Fano, never displayed in Fano and reached Fano's waters, if it reached them at all, in the hold of a Roman ship that sank.

The Italian position has never been that the statue is Italian art. It is that the object became Italian state property at the moment it was raised in an Italian boat's nets, on the argument that a fishing vessel's net is an extension of the vessel and therefore of the flag state's territory. That is a technical proposition about jurisdiction, and it is the whole of Italy's case; the Getty's answer is that the find was in international waters and that a Greek statue has no genuine connection to Italian patrimony beyond a brief clandestine passage across it.

The two positions are not really about the same thing. One is about where a net was. The other is about where a sculptor lived. They have been argued past each other for sixty years.

Where it stands

The bronze is on view at the Getty Villa in Gallery 111, catalogued as Greek, about 300 to 100 BC, object number 77.AB.30. It is Italian state property under an Italian forfeiture order that the European Court of Human Rights has declined to disturb. Italy's request to the United States Attorney General to enforce that order, made in 2019, was still pending when Strasbourg ruled. The Getty is reported to have cancelled a planned loan to Florence for fear the statue would be seized once it was inside Italian jurisdiction, which is the clearest indication available of how both sides read the position.

A collector doing diligence on any comparable object should take two things from this record. The first is that a favourable criminal judgment in the source country is worth very much less than it looks, and that a court has now said so at the highest level available in Europe. The second is that an unenforced forfeiture order does not decay. It has been outstanding since 2010, has survived a constitutional challenge and a human rights application, and the object cannot be sold, lent across a border or insured against seizure while it stands.