[MSN] The Museum World's Italian Sheriff. Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has swaggered into the genteel world of antiquities like a new sheriff in town.

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Friday, Oct. 05, 2007
The Museum World's Italian Sheriff
By Jeff Israely/Rome

Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has swaggered into the genteel
world of antiquities like a new sheriff in town. And for many of the world's
top museums, which have long trotted out treasures with dubious origins, his
message is simple: this cocktail party is over. Just ask the highbrow crowd
at the J. Paul Getty museum, which was finally forced to sign a deal with
Rutelli last week to return 40 artifacts that were illegally taken from
Italian soil. "This is a fresh start for Getty," Rutelli told TIME. "They
are aware that an era is over." 

The always suave former Rome mayor made the rounds on Italian national
television Thursday night with the first four pieces the Getty has already
returned, including a prized 5th century B.C. vase attributed to the Greek
painter Euphronios. In an interview this week with TIME, Rutelli said the
deal with the Getty - which follows smaller-scale agreements with the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts -
marks a watershed in the international effort to force otherwise upstanding
cultural institutions to turn over works with a nefarious past. "We're
proud... of the ethical value of this 'cultural diplomacy,'" he said,
clearly toning down his tough-guy negotiating posture of recent months, with
victory at hand. "In Italy, thanks to this intransigence, illegal digging
activity has fallen sharply, and the international accords are blocking much
of the trafficking." 

Beyond the art thieves linked to established organized crime networks,
Rutelli also said there is evidence that terrorists were getting rich off
the racket. "There are conversations in which [Sep. 11 suicide bomber]
Mohammed Atta was talking about some of the financing of terrorism... coming
from the illicit art trafficking market," he said. But Rutelli said there is
also a "scientific" motivation for his unprecedented push to resolve these
standoffs directly with the musuems. "The issue is also one of context. If
you have a stolen masterpiece, you don't know its history. You don't know
where it comes from, if it's from Sicily or Apulia, or Magna Grecia," he
said. "They are doomed to be anonymous." With that in mind, Rutelli also
plays good cop in the negotiations. "To the museum that returns stolen
works, we loan for several years works that are equally important and
valuable. Therefore, those spaces don't go empty," he said. Indeed, the most
precious piece that the Getty has agreed to return - a 5th century B.C.
statue of a goddess thought to be Aphrodite - will stay on display at the
Los Angeles museum until 2010. 

Two issues were not resolved by last week's agreement: the status of the
disputed Victorious Youth bronze statue, and criminal proceedings in Italy
against Marion True, former curator of the Getty, though a civil suit
against True was dropped. The Getty's current Director Michael Brand, who
came to the museum in 2005, after it emerged that many items in the
collection of the Getty Villa were probably looted from Italian sites, said
top museums must help set new tougher standards, though with limits in how
far back a country can contest patrimony. He wants to see 1970 as a cutoff
date. "Our previous policy was widely acclaimed as one of the strictest in
the U.S. It wasn't as strict as the one we have now," he told TIME. "The
basic goal is that museums should want to build their collections. But they
should also collect responsibly." 

For now, it is Rutelli who is doing the collecting. He says once all 40
pieces arrive from Los Angeles, there will be a kind of
What-We-Got-Back-From the Getty exhibit. After that, permanent homes will be
found, though Rutelli jokes that the statues don't get to choose their
company. "After Boston returned her, we sent the statue of the wife of the
emperor Hadrian back to Tivoli to be beside her husband, though we're not
sure if he was so happy to have her back. He was a restless one." Rutelli,
who is happily married, is clearly restless in other ways. With reporting by
Richard Lacayo/New York

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1668858,00.html