Results for “getty”
The Medici Archive Investigation
In 1995, investigators raided a warehouse in the Geneva Freeport and uncovered the archive of dealer Giacomo Medici — thousands of Polaroids of freshly looted objects that became a Rosetta Stone for the antiquities trade and drove restitutions from museums around the world.
The Getty Museum Repatriation Cases
The J. Paul Getty Museum, the wealthiest art institution in the world, was forced to return around 40 looted antiquities to Italy and Greece after investigators traced them to illicit excavations — and to put its own curator on trial.
Giacomo Medici
Italian antiquities dealer at the centre of the largest looted-antiquities network ever exposed. A 1995 raid on his rooms in the Geneva Freeport uncovered thousands of Polaroids documenting freshly looted objects — the 'Medici archive' that let investigators trace treasures to museums including the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Convicted in Rome in 2004 of dealing in looted antiquities, he became the emblem of the illicit trade the Carabinieri spent decades dismantling. (Illustrative image: a red-figure krater of the type he trafficked.)
Robert Hecht
American antiquities dealer long suspected of being a linchpin of the illicit trade between Mediterranean tomb-robbers and the world's great museums. He sold the Euphronios krater to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 and was later tried in Italy alongside Giacomo Medici and Getty curator Marion True; the case against him lapsed on the statute of limitations before a verdict. He died in 2012. (image: Hecht and the Euphronios krater he sold to the Met.)