Three cheers for the Getty Museum which has finally decided enough is enough when it comes to the Italian government's increasing game of cultural extortion.
Using the gullible press as a PR tool and leveraging recent victories over the Metropolitan Museum in NY and the Boston MFA, the Italian government kept up an increasing effort to claw back more and more antiquities from the Getty's collection.
After months of prolonged negotiations, the Getty Museum based in Malibu, CA, walked out of talks this week effectively drawing a line in the sand with the Italians.
According to the UK's Independent newspaper, Michael Brand, the director of the Getty, has sent a closely argued, six-page letter to Francesco Rutelli, the Minister of Culture, saying he is "deeply saddened" by the failure to reach agreement after more than a year of talks, and announcing the end of "these present negotiations". Mr Rutelli's office said the letter had been received "with surprise and disappointment".
At the center of the dispute, as reported in the Independent, is an enormous marble and limestone statue of the goddess Aphrodite, sold to the Getty for $18m (£10m) by a British antiquities dealer who was jailed last year. The statue, one of the glories of the Malibu museum, is claimed by the Italians to have been dug up by grave robbers in Morgantina, Sicily, and illegally exported to Switzerland, where the British dealer Robin Symes sold it on to the Americans. But the statue is just one item on a list of objects the Italian government has been demanding be returned.
The Getty, which thoroughly researched the provenance prior to the purchase, traced ownership to a Sicilian man named Renzo Canavesi who stated the statue had been in his family since 1939. Some scholars who have closely examined the statue, including one who is an authority on the archaeology of Morgantina, say there is no evidence that the Aphrodite came from that area.
The actions by the Getty, one of the richest and most philanthropic museums in the world (which grants tens of millions of dollars for archaeological and conservation projects in Italy!), indicate a possible sea change in the seeming one-sided battle over cultural patrimony that has been waged by the Italian government since 2001. It is good to finally see an American museum take a firm stand with reagrds to its collection and resist the urge to simply roll over in the hope of averting negative press headlines.
