The Medici Conspiracy Read Free Page A

Greek and Roman gold and silver coins.

    On learning all this, the enterprising Gage dashed to Beirut, traced Sarrafian, who—over several whiskies at the St. George Hotel—told him that Hecht had just been and gone. Sarrafian, according to Gage, was a smalltime dealer in coins, who also organized archaeological tourism. He would not at first say what, exactly, Hecht had paid him for the vase, or why the American had flown to see him in such a hurry. He admitted to Gage that he did not collect—either vases or statues—but had inherited “a hatbox full of pieces.” This is the man that the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, would not identify to begin with because he owned other “major objects” that the museum might want.
    This whole set of events—so improbable, so inconsistent and mysterious—had created a furor in Italy, as had the fact that so far as the fractures in the vase were concerned, none of them crossed any of the ten faces on the figures. This was miraculous good fortune. Unless, perhaps, the vase had been deliberately and carefully broken in order to smuggle it more easily out of the country where it had been found.
    Gage didn’t give up. Back in Rome, and acting on a tip, he drove to Cerveteri, the ancient site of an Etrurian city northwest of Rome, and went from door to door asking for a man known as il Ciccione (a modern American equivalent would be “Fatso”). According to the story he wrote later, Gage was eventually led to a two-room stone house where he found “a short, husky, unshaven man in bare feet.” This was Armando Cenere, a farm laborer and mason, who confessed to also being a tombarolo , or tomb robber. Later in the evening, sitting by his stove, Cenere further confessed that he had been one of a team of six men who had been digging nearby at Sant’Angelo in mid-November 1971, when they had turned up the base and handle of a Greek vase. He was detailed as “lookout” while the others cleared the entire tomb, a process that took a week. They found many pieces, including a winged sphinx, which they left in a field and then tipped off the police about it. This was to divert suspicion from themselves and what else they had found.
    Cenere recalled to Gage one piece of pottery that, he said, showed a man bleeding from three wounds. Shown a photograph of the Met’s Euphronios vase, he identified the portrait of the dying Sarpedon. He said he had been paid 5.5 million lire (about $8,800) as his (equal) share of the payoff.

    Cenere’s testimony, though vivid, was not conclusive. He could have been mistaken, he could have been inventing the details, in the hope of payment, or the limelight. If he and his friends did find the vase, and it was in pieces, it was unlikely that none of the breaks would cut across at least one of the figures’ faces. Certainly, Thomas Hoving didn’t accept the tombarolo’s version; he even said the Met was being “framed” by the Times .
    Eventually, the case came to court in Italy. In the witness box, Cenere went back on everything he had told the New York Times . He and Hecht were acquitted, though the latter was also declared persona non grata in Italy, to add to his similar status in Turkey. He moved to Paris.

    At the end of 1972, when von Bothmer gave his talk to the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (after which he was not voted on to the board of trustees), his subject was the myth of Sarpedon, illustrated with slides of its portrayal by the artist Euphronios. During the course of his presentation, von Bothmer showed not only scenes from the Met’s krater but also an earlier treatment of the same subject on a smaller cup, or kylix. In other words, this cup was a second unknown work by Euphronios. Wasn’t this an extraordinary coincidence—that the krater should show up after fifty years in Sarrafian’s collection, and then