Cult Statue of a Goddess

A seven-foot cult statue of the last quarter of the fifth century BC, built out of two materials: a body of Sicilian limestone with the head, arms and feet worked in imported Parian marble. It is one of very few pieces of high Classical sculpture to survive anywhere, and the only one of its kind in Italy. Nobody knows which goddess it represents.

It was dug out of the sanctuary at contrada San Francesco Bisconti at Morgantina, in central Sicily, in 1979, cut into pieces and moved. In 1986 the Lugano tobacconist Renzo Canavesi sold it to the London dealer Robin Symes for 400,000 dollars. On 25 July 1988 the J. Paul Getty Museum bought it from Symes for 18 million dollars, which remains among the largest sums ever paid for an antiquity. Within the same month Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, said publicly that he knew it had come from a clandestine excavation at Morgantina.

The decisive evidence was in the stone. Petrographic analysis established that the limestone came from the Hyblaean quarries of southeastern Sicily. The Getty refused to give the statue up for nineteen years. What eventually moved it was not a court but a bargain: the Rome investigations into the Medici network, the criminal prosecution of the Getty's own antiquities curator Marion True, and an agreement signed with the Italian Ministry of Culture in September 2007 under which forty objects went back. True was never convicted of anything, in Italy or in Greece; both prosecutions ended when the limitation periods expired, the Italian one on 13 October 2010. The statue reached Italy on 17 March 2011 and went on show in a former Capuchin monastery in a hill town of six thousand people, where about seventeen thousand people a year see it. At the Getty Villa it had been seen by about four hundred thousand.

A goddess made of two stones, and the join is the whole argument

The statue stands about 2.20 metres and weighs, by one report, around 1,300 pounds. Its body, and all of the drapery, is Sicilian limestone. The head, the exposed arms and the feet - everything meant to read as skin - are Parian marble.

This is the pseudo-acrolithic technique, and in Sicily it has a history: the same division of materials appears in the metopes of Temple E at Selinunte. It exists for a plain economic reason. Marble had to be shipped to Sicily and limestone did not, so a workshop bought marble for the parts that had to be flesh and quarried the rest at home.

That economy is why this record exists in the form it does. A statue made entirely of imported marble tells you nothing about where it was carved. A statue whose bulk is local stone carries its birthplace in its body, and can be read by a geologist.

The carving is post-Phidian in manner, from the years of the Peloponnesian War: the wet-drapery effect across the torso, where the cloth clings and reveals the body beneath, and the deep, generous folds visible only from the side and the back. The drapery is finished all the way round, which means the figure was made to stand free on a pedestal and be walked around. The back of the head is not finished at all, only roughed out, which suggests it carried a layer of stucco supporting a wig or a drawn-up himation.

Nobody knows which goddess she is

The Getty called her Aphrodite. That identification was proposed by Marion True, the curator who recommended the purchase, and it stuck for twenty-two years in the museum's own labels, in the press, and in the title of the book that eventually told the story.

Most specialists no longer accept it. Katerina Greco, a Sicilian archaeological official and a leading scholar of Greek art who wrote one of the few studies of the statue, has argued for Demeter, on the matronly build and the remains of a veil covering the hair, a feature usually associated with older women in Greek convention. Clemente Marconi of New York University has argued for Persephone. An Italian reading has her as Demeter holding a torch, now lost, searching for her daughter. Sicilian officials, on the return, rebranded the object as the goddess of Morgantina and dropped the name Venus altogether.

The Getty's own catalogue title was and remains the most honest one available: Cult Statue of a Goddess.

The reason the argument cannot be settled is the reason this record is in an archive about provenance. Key fragments are missing. There is no attribute in her hands, no inscription, no altar, no votive deposit, no sanctuary plan and no assemblage of the objects around her, because none of that was recorded when she came out of the ground. A cult statue whose cult is unknown is the cleanest possible measure of what looting destroys: the object survives entirely and its meaning does not.

Central Sicily makes the loss sharper. This is Persephone country. The ancient sources place her abduction by Hades at the shores of Lake Pergusa, a short drive from Morgantina, and the Greek colonists who settled the region built sanctuaries to Persephone and to her mother Demeter; the ruins of Morgantina are full of terracotta and stone images of the two. A statue of that scale, in that landscape, was almost certainly made for one of those cults, and the one thing nobody can say is which.

1979: the sanctuary at San Francesco Bisconti

Italian accounts place the clandestine excavation in 1979, in the contrada of San Francesco Bisconti at Morgantina, and record that the statue was cut into pieces to be moved.

What is said in Aidone, and has never been confirmed, is that two shepherd brothers found it on the eastern flank of the site, where a sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone has since been excavated. The silence around the detail is not accidental: omerta has kept the exact spot unspoken for more than forty years. Silvio Raffiotta, the local prosecutor who investigated the looting in the 1990s, said in 2011 what a great many archaeologists were thinking - that it was time for them to speak, and that there was now no risk.

The stake is concrete rather than sentimental. If the exact excavation spot were known, archaeologists could go back and dig the area properly, and much of what was destroyed - the cult, the date of deposition, the associated material, possibly the missing fragments - could still be partly recovered. The information is not gone. It is being withheld.

A tobacconist, a London dealer, and a museum in Malibu

The chain that reached the Getty is short and it is not obscure.

Renzo Canavesi kept a tobacconist's shop in the Swiss canton of Ticino, at Chiasso on the Italian border. In 1986 he sold the statue to Robin Symes in London for 400,000 dollars. Symes, one of the two or three most important antiquities dealers of his generation and later a central figure in the exposure of the trade, took it to his London premises and, by the Italian account, tried without success to place it with the best-known American galleries before turning to Malibu.

On 25 July 1988 the J. Paul Getty Museum bought it for 18 million dollars. Canavesi's own account, offered later, was that the statue had been in his family since the 1930s. No document supporting that has ever been produced in any source consulted.

The arithmetic is the part a collector should look at twice. Four hundred thousand dollars in 1986; eighteen million dollars in 1988. A multiple of forty-five in two years, on an object with no publication history, no exhibition history and no owner before a shopkeeper in Chiasso. That is not a market appreciating. It is the price of a document, and the document did not exist.

The objection arrived the same month as the statue

Nobody had to wait for a warehouse raid to know what this object was.

In the same month as the purchase, Thomas Hoving - the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a man with no institutional reason to help Italy and a considerable personal history of aggressive acquisition - stated publicly that he knew the statue came from a clandestine excavation at Morgantina. The Tribunale di Enna opened an investigation on the strength of it.

This is the pattern that recurs across the cases in this archive and it is worth stating flatly. The Euphronios krater was attacked in print within four months of the Metropolitan announcing it. The Sevso export licences were found to be forged by the Getty itself in March 1984, six years before the silver was offered at Sotheby's. Here the objection came within weeks. In none of these cases did the buying museum lack information; in all of them it lacked the will to act on information it already had.

The limestone testified

Italian investigators did what the paperwork made necessary: they analysed the stone.

Petrographic examination of the limestone body traced the material to the Hyblaean quarries of southeastern Sicily. The geological case was published by R. Alaimo, R. Giarrusso, G. Montana and P. Sean Quinn under the title Le prove geologiche a favore della provenienza siciliana - the geological evidence for the Sicilian provenance - in the journal Kalos in 2007.

Consider what that means in evidentiary terms. There was no export licence to forge or expose, no Polaroid, no confession and no witness. There was an object whose seller said it had been in a Swiss family since the 1930s, and a rock that said it had been cut out of a hillside in the province of Ragusa. Provenance research usually works on paper about objects. Here the object was the document.

The same logic recurs across this archive whenever a claim is finally proved: matching woodworm tunnels in a dismembered Cimabue diptych, a fracture surface joining two halves of a Roman Herakles, plaster fragments from a Lydian tomb chamber that fit the wall they were cut from. Physical evidence resists the market in a way that documents do not, because it cannot be commissioned.

A conviction in Enna, and exactly what it was worth

On 5 March 2001 the Tribunale di Enna convicted Renzo Canavesi. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment and ordered to pay 40 billion lire to the Italian state: 20 billion representing the assessed value of the statue and 20 billion in moral damages. Italian commentary records it as the first sanction of that magnitude ever imposed for the clandestine export of an archaeological object.

Precision matters here, because a criminal conviction is routinely misread as settling ownership, and it does not.

First, this was a first-instance judgment of an Italian trial court. This record has not been able to establish whether it survived appeal, and an Italian conviction at first instance is not final. Second, it was a conviction of a middleman for an offence against Italian export law; it was not a judgment against the Getty, which was not a party, and it did not order anybody to hand over anything. Third, it produced no object and no money: the statue stayed in Malibu for another ten years, and no source consulted records the damages being paid.

What the judgment did was official. It put the Italian state's finding on the record, in a court, that this statue had been taken out of Sicily unlawfully. Ten years later that finding was one of the things the Getty was negotiating against.

What actually moved the statue was the prosecution of a curator

Between 1988 and 2005 the Getty's position did not change. What changed was the Italian investigation into the network that had supplied it.

In 2005 Italian prosecutors charged Marion True, the Getty's curator of antiquities, with trafficking in looted antiquities. She stood trial in Rome. In a letter to the J. Paul Getty Trust of 18 December 2006 she wrote that she was being made to carry the burden for practices that had been known, approved and condoned by the Getty's board of directors. In November 2006 the museum's director Michael Brand announced that twenty-six disputed objects would go back to Italy. In September 2007 Italy dropped its civil claims against True, and on 26 September 2007 - 25 September in Italian accounts - the Getty signed an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Culture in Rome for the return of forty of the forty-six objects in dispute, this statue among them, scheduled for 2010.

Neither prosecution of Marion True ever reached a verdict. The Greek charges concerning a gold funerary wreath were dropped in November 2007 when the limitation period expired; the wreath had already gone back to Greece. On 13 October 2010 a court in Rome ended the Italian case for the same reason. She was never convicted of anything, and this record will not describe her as though she had been.

The result is a peculiar and instructive one. The prosecution that produced no conviction produced forty objects.

A transfer under an agreement, not a judgment

The statue left Malibu in the early spring of 2011 and arrived in Italy on 17 March. It went on public display at Aidone on 17 May.

What that was, precisely: a voluntary transfer of title by an American private trust to a foreign state, under a bilateral agreement that also covered thirty-nine other objects and provided for continuing cultural cooperation. It was not a court order. No American court ever ruled on the ownership of this statue and no American proceeding was ever brought about it. Italy did not sue the Getty. The 2001 Italian conviction bound Canavesi, not the museum.

The Getty has never conceded that it bought stolen property, and this record does not put that sentence in its mouth. What it did was agree to return objects whose Italian origin the evidence supported, in exchange for the end of a dispute that was costing it more than the objects were worth.

Four hundred thousand, then seventeen thousand

The Getty Villa showed the statue to around 400,000 people a year. The archaeological museum at Aidone, a hill town of about six thousand in one of the poorest parts of Europe, was seeing about 17,000. The building is a seventeenth-century Capuchin monastery and holds 150 visitors at a time.

The inauguration on 17 May 2011 was a village occasion: a scrum of politicians, journalists and townspeople, two bands in elaborate uniform, a children's choir, hundreds of people standing in cold drizzle, free Aphrodite postcards and t-shirts, and a souvenir shop across the road selling imitation Greek vases, Aphrodite dishes and Aphrodite cigarette trays.

Both halves of the arithmetic are real and neither cancels the other. A universal museum genuinely does show an object to more people; a returned object genuinely is in the landscape it was made for, where a local scholar can measure it, and where the sanctuary that produced it is a twenty-minute drive away. Flavia Zisa of the University of Kore at Enna put the case for the second in a sentence: the statue did not exist by herself, she was made for a specific place and a particular purpose.

There is a harder fact underneath. Many people around Aidone supplement thin incomes by digging and selling material from Morgantina, one of the most productive archaeological sites in the Mediterranean. The town that celebrated the goddess's return is, in part, the town that supplies the market she passed through. Any account of repatriation that ends with a ceremony has stopped one paragraph early.

The scholarship on this object is only starting

For twenty-two years at the Getty the statue was, by the account of those who covered it, virtually ignored by scholars, because the controversy made it untouchable. One of the very few surviving pieces of high Classical sculpture sat in Malibu and generated almost no literature. Katerina Greco, who wrote one of the few studies of it, put its standing plainly: it is one of the very few examples we have from the high Classical period, and there is nothing like it in Italy.

Now that the legal question is closed, the art-historical questions are open, and they are substantial. Which goddess. Whether the slightly awkward marble head actually belongs on the limestone body, or was married to it by a restorer somewhere between a Sicilian hillside and a Swiss shop. Whether the missing attributes can be recovered. What the statue stood in, and what was done in front of it.

Not one of those questions would be difficult if the object had been excavated. All of them are now hard, and some are permanently unanswerable, because of what happened to it in 1979. That, and not the eighteen million dollars, is the cost this record is recording.