Met Director To Meet With Officials In Rome Over Disputed Art Work
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The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to meet today in Rome with Italian cultural officials in talks that could determine the fate of several disputed pieces in the museum’s collection.
The Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, agreed earlier this month to go to Rome to discuss pieces the Italian government says were looted and wants returned. A spokesman for the museum, Harold Holzer would not confirm what would be discussed at the meeting, and said the Met had not received any list of disputed pieces from Italy.
“We’re going to hear what the Italian officials have to say,” Mr. Holzer said.
One piece the Italians are expected to discuss is the Euphronios krater, a 2,500-year-old Greek vase the Met purchased for a then record $1 million in 1972. The krater is considered one of the museum’s most prized antiquities, but its provenance has been in question for decades.
The Met bought the vase from an American art dealer, Robert Hecht Jr. He told the museum he obtained the piece from a Lebanese dealer who said it had belonged to his family since World War I.A grand jury investigation in 1977 by the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, yielded no indictments, and the Euphronios remained in the Met.
Yet according to court documents published last month by the Los Angeles Times, Italian authorities found a manuscript of a memoir by Mr. Hecht in which he tells two stories of how he obtained the Euphronios. In addition to the original account, Mr. Hecht details a second version in which he wrote that he purchased the krater from an Italian dealer, Giacomo Medici, who was convicted last year of trafficking in looted art.
The Italian government’s discussions with the Met and other American museums it suspects of owning looted art are playing out against the backdrop of a high-profile trial in Italy. Mr. Hecht and Marion True, a former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, are charged with conspiring to sell stolen works.
In the course of its investigation of Mr. Medici, Italian investigators have unearthed evidence, reported to include Polaroid photographs, which they say proves that more than 100 antiquities at museums across America, Europe, and Asia were illegally taken from Italy.
The Getty, long a target of the Italians in their investigation of Ms. True, earlier this month returned three pieces to the country as a show of goodwill.