The Medici Conspiracy Read Free Page B

another piece should surface at the same time? Furthermore, what von Bothmer didn’t know just then was that the police investigations of the krater in Italy (following publication of the New York Times article) had, quite independently, uncovered rumors about the existence of a second Euphronios work—a kylix—also with a dying warrior scene. Tackled later by journalists, von Bothmer admitted that he had a photograph of the kylix but had never seen the cup itself. He wouldn’t show anyone the photograph, he said, since “the owner might have a prior claim on it” (although he had used the photo readily enough in his AIA lecture). Moreover, he didn’t know where the actual object was—“It’s supposed to be in Norway.”
    Discussing the kylix, Hoving and von Bothmer got themselves into a real muddle over who had seen what, and when. In the first place, Hoving
changed his story. In an interview with David Shirey of the New York Times , he said at first that he had never seen the kylix, or even a photograph of it. Later, he telephoned back and said, “I want to be perfectly clear that I never saw the cup. I did see a photograph.” One reason for this change may have been that, late in the day, he recalled an interview he had given to a reporter from the London Sunday newspaper, the Observer , which was also interested in the Met’s controversial acquisition, because it might have been smuggled out of Britain. To an Observer reporter, Hoving admitted being offered—in fact, on that very day of the interview—a kylix by Euphronios, a cup that he said was signed, was in fragments, had pieces missing, but showed Sarpedon being carried off by Sleep and Death. Hoving told the reporter the cup had been made about twenty years before the krater.
    Later, still before Gage published the first of his articles, von Bothmer said it was Hecht who had the kylix and had had it since before he’d had the krater. On this occasion, von Bothmer also said that he had seen the kylix in Zurich, in July 1971, thus giving a different version to what he had said before, when he had claimed not to have seen the kylix and didn’t know where it was. He told the Observer reporter that he didn’t want to say too much more about the cup, because he wanted to buy it. There followed this exchange:
    OBSERVER: Isn’t it a good fortune for Robert Hecht . . . that he manages to have first the vase and then the cup?
    VON BOTHMER: The other way round—the cup has been owned for a couple of years, I was shown this cup in July 1971. [Pause.] I stopped in Zurich and I saw the cup and I have my notes and my dates. I would put it differently—the cup at the price then being quoted me was not nearly so exciting to me until after this object [the vase] appeared. Therefore, when you have two of a kind, it takes on greater significance.
    In other words, von Bothmer implied that the Euphronios krater had surfaced some time after July 1971, when he saw the cup in Zurich. Was he not then aware of Sarrafian’s letter to Hecht, dated July 10, 1971, affirming that the krater had been in the Sarrafian family for more than fifty years and that Hecht had already—by July 1971—seen it in Zurich?

    That was not the end of the confusion. A later affidavit by Sarrafian said that when he had made the vase available to Hecht, in 1971, it was in pieces and “Hecht was warned that I am not responsible for any missing pieces.” This was confusing and inconsistent on three grounds. First, he also said he had authorized its restoration “three years ago”—that is, in 1969. How could that be, if it hadn’t surfaced until July 1971? Second, Fritz Bürki had reported that when he received the vase in the summer of 1971, it had already been restored but “so badly I had to take it to pieces and restore it all over again.” Third, von Bothmer had said earlier that when