The "Fano Lysippos", that J Paul
Getty Considered the Ultimate, Claimed by
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
"Fano Lysippos"
is NOT just another antiquity!!!!!!
J.
Paul Getty fell in love with the bronze after seeing photos after restoration,
and concluded that it would become "the museum's prized piece and probably
the best work of ancient art , not only in his beloved
Yes,
20 antiquities looted from
High
credit is due to Italian Minister of Culture Rocco Buttiglioni
whose research, discovery, pursuit, and retrieval of Italian Patrimony has been Tenacious and Unrelenting, and Extremely
Successful. His Collaboration with the Italian Justice system has aided
his cause by putting Judicial pressure on the
Reluctant Culprits.
But
regarding this "Fano Lysippos",
in 1964, Italian Fishermen from the Adriatic coastal village of Fano, 70 miles east of Florence,(and
just south of Pesaro, and just north of first Senigalia, and then Ancona) hooked
in their fishing nets, perhaps one of the ONLY existing of 1500 works of Lysippos, who did most of his work in Bronze, and
who was the personal sculptor of Alexander the Great. Lysippos'
craftsmanship is known today only through several Roman marble copies of his
work. When found, this Lysippos had layer
upon layer of encrustation, and was
unrecognizable, except for the surety of being an antiquity of some sort.
The
statue depicts a young athlete, probably made in the ancient Greek city of
The
bronze was probably hauled from its original site in
But
the
The Fishermen received $5,600, for their find, and after careful restoration,
the
The
article below describes the Odyssey of the "Fano Lysippos" from
fishermen , through the Art "underworld", to prominence.
The
Greek bronze now at the Getty Villa has a potent allure. Just ask the Italian
fishermen who hauled it up in 1964 and sold it for $5,600.
By
Jason Felch, Times Staff Writer
FANO,
By dusk, the Ferri had reached the spot. The seven men
in the crew cast their nets and fished all night, dozing in shifts.
Early the next morning, the nets caught on a snag. The boat's engine whined.
With a jolt, the nets came free. Crewman Igli Rosato watched as a barnacle-encrusted figure emerged from
the sea.
"C'e un morto!"
cried one of the fishermen, Rosato recalled.
"There's a dead man!"
But the figure discernible through the layer of shells was too rigid and heavy
to be a man. The fishermen dragged the clunky object to the front of the boat
and returned to their chores. Later, when they stopped for a breakfast of
roasted fish, one of them scraped a patch of barnacles off the f! igure and let out a yelp.
"E d'oro!" he cried, pointing at the
flash of brilliant yellow underneath the shell. "It's gold!"
Romeo Pirani, the captain of the boat, pushed through
the men and examined the exposed metal where the figure's feet should have
been, Rosato recalled.
Bronze, not gold, the captain declared.
The Ferri's crew occasionally pulled up Roman urns in
their nets but had never seen anything quite like this.
The life-size figure had one hand raised to its head. It had black holes for
eyes. Given the thickness of its encrustations, it looked as if it had been on
the ocean floor for centuries. It might be worth something.
The crew made a quick decision: Rather than turn the statue over to
authorities, as required by Italian law, they would sell it and divvy up the
profit.
After the Ferri docked in the predawn darkness at Fano, the crew took the statue ashore on a fish cart,
hidden under a pil! e of
nets.
The bronze spent a few days in the house of the trawler's owner, but rumors of
its existence started to spread through town, Rosato
recalled.
Worried that a jealous neighbor would tell
With the statue safely hidden, the fishermen contacted the Barbetti
brothers, Giacomo and Fabio, whose family owned a cement
factory in nearby Gubbio. They were antiquarians who
occasionally bought ancient objects turned up by farmers or fishermen and sold
them to wealthy foreigners.
When Giacomo Barbetti saw
the statue in the cabbage field, he suspected it was a major find. Touching the
figure's nose, he thought it might even be the work of Lysippos,
one of the greatest sculptors of ancient
The Barbettis bought it for 4 million lire, about
$5,600 at the time and about $36,000
today. The amount was divided
among the two dozen or so people who by then had become involved in the
statue's journey.
"Three to four million lire, it was a huge
amount," Rosato recalled. "People started
sweating when they heard that amount."
As the youngest man aboard the Ferri,
Rosato got about $130. He had hoped to use the money
to take a short vacation, but when he returned home from his next voyage, he
learned that his mother had used it to pay their debts at the grocery store.
The sale to the Barbettis
began the modern odyssey of one of the greatest bronze statues to survive from
ancient
It is a journey like that taken
by thousands of ancient objects, spirited across borders and through an
often-obscure trail of owners before reaching a new home. In the case of the
statue, that would be a humidity-controlled room at the newly reopened Getty
Villa in Pacific Palisades.
The bronze proved more slippery
than most as it passed! through a net of international
laws intended to govern the trade in ancient artifacts. Because it was found in
international waters,
The dispute, now playing out in
negotiations between the Getty and Italian officials, brings to the surface
some of the deeper issues in the debate about who should be the rightful owner
of objects from cultures long dead. After all, to whom does a statue made in
ancient
International law generally
recognizes as owner the country where an antiquity is discovered in modern
times, not where it was created.
Critics of such claims —
American museums and private collectors among them — cite their own sense
of justice, saying that objects of such importance and rarity should belong to
humanity, not one nation.
Who will prevail, and whether
there will be one more stop in the bronze's long journey, will probably be
decided in the coming months.
The statue depicts a young
athlete. Remnants of flax found in its core suggest that it was made in the
ancient Greek city of
Several experts have concluded that the statue is perhaps one of dozens
depicting Olympic victors that Lysippos, the personal
sculptor of Alexander the Great, created to line the pathways of the birthplace
of the games. But proving that Lysippos was the artist
may not be possible, Mattusch and others say. If Lysippos did sculpt the statue, it is the only one of his
1,500 works thought to have survived. His craftsmanship is known today only
through several Roman copies of his work.
The bronze was probably hauled from its site to a Roman transport ship
around the time of Christ, when the wealthy of
The statue's watery grave is probably what saved it. Most Greek bronzes
were melted down or destroyed by the elements. Of the handful of complete
bronzes to survive antiquity, virtually all have been found in the sea.
According to court records, the Barbettis
temporarily entrusted their new purchase to a local priest, Giovanni Nanni, who stored it in his church's sacristy. Fearing
discovery, Nanni later moved it to the space under
his wooden staircase. Neighbors noticed a string of foreign cars arriving at
the priest's house and informed local authorities. By the time Italian
investigators showed up, however, the statue had disappeared, authorities said.
The government decided to prosecute the Barbetti
brothers for trafficking in stolen goods, arguing that they had disposed of a
statue that pr! operly
belonged to the state. The fishermen were not charged.
In 1966, the Barbettis were sentenced to four
months in jail, and Nanni was given two months as an
accessory. The convictions were overturned five years later on the grounds that
a discovery in international waters could not be considered stolen property.
The Barbettis, perhaps fearful of also being
charged with export violations, would not say to whom they sold the statue.
When Rosato met Giacomo
Barbetti later while trying to sell another find, the
antiquarian told him the statue had brought him nothing but legal problems.
"I didn't make anything," a crying Barbetti
said, according to Rosato. Barbetti
opened his coin purse and pulled out a small piece of shell: "This is all
I have left of it."
In 1971, soon after the reversal of the Barbettis'
conviction, the statue resurfaced in
One of the partners in the consortium was Heinz Herzer,
a prominent German antiquities dealer who had studied Egyptology and
archeology. Herzer said he remembered the moment he
first saw the statue in
"It sent a chill down my back," he said. The statue's pose,
with its hand poised centimeters away from its head, moments after donning the
victor's wreath, "indicated an incredible technical skill," Herzer said.
His concerns about the statue's legal status were assuaged by the outcome
of the Barbettis' court case in
"I thought to myself, 'This is one of the most spectacular purchases
that cannot be claimed by a country of origin,' " he recalled.
Herzer moved the statue to
What emerged was the lithe figure of a you! ng athlete. Herzer was
convinced he had a work of Lysippos.
His conclusion was supported by Bernard Ashmole,
a renowned British expert in Greek and Roman art. Ashmole
was also a personal advisor to oil baron and antiquities collector J. Paul
Getty, and urged him to consider buying it. Getty, who was building his museum
in
He concluded that it would become "the museum's prized piece and
probably the best work of ancient art not only in his beloved
At the same time, Getty was determined not to spend a penny more than
necessary to get the statue.
In 1974, he joined forces with
Complicating the negotiation were renewed attempts by
The battle for cultural objects was a hot topic at the time, thanks to
the controversy over the Euphronios krater, a Greek vase looted from
Getty wanted to avoid such trouble and insisted that several legal
conditions be met before the purchase proceed, Hoving recalled: written permission from the Italian
minister of culture and the head of the country's a! rt squad, and proof that the statue had received
permission to leave the country.
But before those conditions were met, negotiations stalled, Hoving said. Getty died in 1976, leaving instructions to
acquire the statue. A year later, the trustees of the young museum voted to pay
Herzer and Artemis $3.98 million for it. It was among
the first purchases they made.
After a brief stop at museums in
Whether curator Frel or the trustees required
that Getty's legal conditions be met is unclear. The Getty will not comment. Frel left the museum in the 1980s after allegations of
forgery, tax fraud and other misdeeds surfaced.
Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. Herzer
said he doesn't know if the bronze had a! n export
license.
By the time word of the record-breaking sale reached the fishing
community of Fano, about 90 miles east of
Regional papers have bemoaned its loss in headlines over the last three
decades: "Fano Cries
for the Lysippos," "A City Mobilized for
Its Treasure," "Fano Asks That Statue Be
Renamed the Athlete of Fano."
The Fano Archeological Club gathered 8,000
signatures for a petition saying it should be returned. The Fig Tree
Fraternity, a group of retired fishermen who gather under a fig tree by the
port, still debate what they would have done had they been the ones to find it.
A theater company recently retold the Lysippos'
tragicomic tale in the local dialect, filling a 600-seat theater for a week.
The statue's name adorns a local travel agency and the town's monthly magazine.
In the late 1990s, Pirani, the captain of the Ferruccio Ferri who years ago had
received about $250 for! his share of the statue, took
up a collection in town for airfare to
"He realized what a treasure he had had in his hands," recalled
the friend, who gave a framed picture of the Lysippos
to Pirani's widow when the captain died a few years
ago. "It was one of the biggest disappointments of his life."
Giancarlo D'Anna, a 51-year-old Fano resident and member of the regional government,
remembers hearing about the statue as a boy.
"It is a symbol of getting something back from
the sea, which has taken so much from us," D'Anna
said. "People need to dream about a goal. This is a polestar for us."
And the fact that it was the people of Fano who sold
it?
"At the time, they needed money to survive, and didn't really realize the
value," he said with a shrug.
Last September, D'Anna also made the pilgrimage to
"I've come from
They referred him to the
"If you're not showing it, give it to us for six years and we! 'll show it!" D'Anna said over dinner in Fano.
"At least lend it to us! It's better than nothing."
The feeling is not unique to Fano.
"In an enfeebled way, what is true of Fano is
true of
The Getty, and its many American supporters, thinks otherwise.
When, in March 1989, Italian authorities requested that the bronze be returned,
When
In February, the bronze reappeared publicly when the Getty Villa reopened. An
afternoon at the museum suggests that Angelenos have
come to feel that, after three decades here, the Getty Bronze is now part of
their own cultural heritage.
Sam and Harriett Trueblood stood transfixed in the
room dedicated to the bronze, admiring how the athlete's distant gaze appears
to ponder what his victory will mean for the future.
"It would break our hearts to see these things leave here," said Sam,
81, motioning to the bronze. "We've come to see it many times. This is the
most important thing for us to see."
"His beauty lies in the energy he brings out in people," said Tobey Wheeler, a Getty security guard standing nearby.
"It's what it inspires more than what it is."
As the Villa was celebrating its grand opening, Getty officials were meeting
with Italian authorities a! round a large wooden table
in the Italian Cultural Ministry. The statue is one of 52 Getty objects that
The Met recently agreed to return the Euphronios krater and 20 other artifacts to
Behind the legalisms lies something more profound: the mysterious relationship
that a beautiful piece of art can forge with the people who come into contact
with it.
"The people of Fano, although they never had the
piece, they believe they have a stake in it," said Walsh, now retired.
"They're in love with an ideal, an idea that they're somehow personally
connected to this pure and wonderful expression of human potential.
"The motive for people in an obscure corner of
*
(INFOBOX! BELOW)
Hidden treasure
1964: Italian fishermen find the statue and sell it for
$5,600; it soon disappears.
1971: It resurfaces in
1977:
1989: Italian authorities initiate their efforts to get
the bronze back from the Getty.
2006: The bronze is a star in the
rollout of the newly renovated Getty Villa.
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