The Medici Conspiracy
First reviewed April 2013
More than the content, I remember the context of reading this book. I was well and truly free in the middle of 2013 for the first time in my life, though I don’t think I could see it at the time. I worked in a job I quite liked, split rent on the tattered scraps of a doomed relationship, and generally spent my time wandering NYC and teaching myself to confront and edit my own writing.
This review needed remarkably little reworking; while I would certainly change the style, I didn’t really have to edit much for clarity or typos. Clearly a testament to my boundless free time in the halcyon days of 2013.
by Peter Watson & Cecilia Todeschini
It often feels that the modern non-fiction book has eschewed the staid reserve of information transfer to weave narratives that blend author and subject into a cohesive whole. The fly-on-the-wall “Grand Narratives” of Game Change and Too Big to Fail, both late 2010, had the vox populi appeal, their commercial success harbinging a sea change in non-fiction that led to a surfeit of dialogue reconstruction, memoir-esque retrospection, and direct appeals to reader-as-fellow-traveler.
The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums was published and written without concern for approachability; niche writing for an esoteric audience. Its antediluvian sensibility—before the flood of mass market demands forced nonfiction authors to be screenwriters rather than professors—is almost refreshing. The Medici Conspiracy wants you to know every last detail of the trial of Giacomo Medici, true; more important is the context. To even approach Giacomo Medici, you have to be brought into the world of antiquities smuggling.
Essentially, it is a book in two parts—first a catechism that informs the laity while casting reproach amongst the clergy:
Renfrew [a respected archaeologist], Elia said, had written about the collection as a jewel, as a wonderful aspect of Cycladic art—and yet, archaeologically speaking, it had no meaning. Because these objects had been looted, no one could have any real idea which island they had come from, what age they were, what their function was, what their relationship was to one another, whether they had been painted over in antiquity, and so on. For Elia, the Goulandris Collection barely deserved the name: It was booty rather than a proper collection, which ought to tell us as much as possible about the past.
The second section is courtroom thriller, an eschatological parable for looters, traffickers, and curators of rogue museums:
Tombaroli, and even Medici on occasions, in the proceedings against him, like to portray themselves as lovers of the arts, as “experts” or professional archaeologists in a sense, helping to “preserve” material that would otherwise be “lost” to history. How plausible is that when the same people knowingly trade in openly stolen artifacts, and deliberately damage them to disguise where they come from?
During the “The Fall of Robin Symes” chapter—a vignette written in the direct-access feel of recent non-fiction—the ponderousness of the rest of the prose is brought into stark relief. That isn’t a condemnation; the dusty, technical writing, resplendent in its details and comfortable in its esotericism, simply is not conducive to gobbling up text:
The acquisition of vases in fragments—“the sale of Orphans” as Pellegrini put it—enables a museum to acquire a valuable vase, not for nothing exactly, but more cheaply than if the vase were to be acquired whole or intact. The fact that, as True said, the fragments fit snugly together and were not worn may well mean that vases are broken deliberately, at the start of the process, to set up the subterfuge we are identifying.
What The Medici Conspiracy does well is inform the reader about something you may not know; much of the antiquities populating the world’s most prestigious museums were looted in the past fifty years. Repulsive facts—that vases are unearthed intact and broken into bits to be more easily sold, more difficult to track, or to sweeten larger deals to museums—are handed out with depressing regularity and supported in the text proper with first-hand quotations as well as cited in an extensive dossier of seized documents, reprinted en masse at the end of the book.
You see how antiquities are unearthed:
Hecht records how in 1963, a Swiss dealer went so far as to equip the looters in Tarquinia (well known for its painted tombs) with electric saws, with which they could more easily strip frescoes from the walls of tombs and villas. Ironically, when the police discovered what was happening, they decided that only Americans would risk and finance such flamboyant looting techniques and Hecht’s residence permit was revoked.
You see how antiquities are sold:
Even when a place-name is given as a find side, it turns out that many are really euphemisms, phrases that are so vague as to be archaeologically meaningless. Instead of saying “Turkey,” dealers use the terms “Anatolia,” “Asia Minor,” “Black Sea Region,” “Ionia,” and so forth. A spurious aura of provenance fills space in the catalog, making it appear that collections curators, or the sales room catalogers, have earned their fee.
Once the reader has a basic understanding of the structure and scope of the antiquities trade—most torn out of the earth without provenance—it becomes clear that the courtroom drama of Giacomo Medici is representational, a cipher. The Medici Conspiracy trades on the recognizable name of Lorenzo the Great and other Renaissance-era Medicis to hook the casual reader, seizing on the kismet that a name so entrenched in the subconscious international image of Italian art could be worked into the title:
However, there is a sense that the legal fate of these figures is, if not an incidental matter, no longer the main event. The sheer scale of illicit trade in looted antiquities, its organized nature, the routine deception, the superb quality of so much of the material, the close proximity of museum curators and major collectors to underworld figures—that is now there for all to see.
There is something poetic about the The Medici Conspiracy; the art and antiquities it discusses are breathtaking, but it is not a beautiful book. It is written in a technical style that emphasizes information—even to the extent that it occasionally repeats itself—ahead of readability. It can be tedious, exacting, too focused on minutiae. It is a written reconstruction of an in situ archaeological dig; no outsider is ever going to “Ooh” and “Aah” over a plot of dirt with a few potsherds sticking out. Most would rather see the reconstructed Euphronios Krater sitting under glass.
The Medici Conspiracy is not Tombaroli, does not rip frescoes from the wall in an odious attempt hold the reader's attention. It relies on the documented context, orientation, and condition of the facts as they were unearthed to convey its point. If you decide to read it, you will spend your time dusting off tiny bits of the past with exacting care.