After 18 months
of intense negotiations, the
Nine of the 10
ancient Greek and Etruscan objects were delivered on Wednesday to the Italian
Consulate on Park Avenue and will soon be crated and shipped to
Mr. Rutelli said that Ms. Whites decision was
"extraordinarily positive" as well as groundbreaking. "It is a
generous and open-minded gesture," he said.
Although
Ms. White did not
respond to messages left on Thursday. A spokesman for Ms. White, Fraser P. Seitel, said by e-mail, "We have nothing to report at
the moment but will let you know."
Ms. White has
always maintained that she and her husband, Leon
Levy, who died in 2003, bought their artifacts in good faith and had no
knowledge that any may have been clandestinely excavated.
Ms. White, who
sits on the Mets board of trustees, is a major force in the citys
arts and educational philanthropy. With Mr. Levy, a Wall Street financier, she
gave $20 million to finance the Mets expanded wing of Greek and Roman art,
which reopened last spring; the Leon Levy Foundation, for which she is the lead
trustee, in 2006 made a $200 million gift of cash and real estate to New
York University that will finance a new Institute for the Study of
the Ancient World.
The artifacts
given back by Ms. White include some of the finest showpieces in any private
collection of classical antiquities in the world. Until recently, some were on
view at the Met in an extended loan, including a red-figured vessel depicting Herakles slaying Kyknos, signed
by the celebrated fifth-century B.C. painter Euphronios,
and a pot with scenes of Zeus and Herakles attributed
to the fifth-century B.C. painter Eucharides.
Italian investigators
say that they have traced the Eucharides and some of
the other artifacts to be returned to an Italian dealer convicted in 2004 of
trafficking in illegal antiquities. Polaroid photographs seized in 1995 in a
raid on two Swiss warehouses used by the dealer, Giacomo
Medici, showed works either encrusted with dirt or in pieces, as if recently
unearthed. Ms. White and her husband bought some of those objects from Robin Symes, a
Italian
government officials have not contended that the couple was involved in any
crime, nor have they threatened Ms. White with prosecution. (A former curator
from the
Although not
accusatory, the negotiations with Ms. White were arduous and sometimes bitter,
Italian officials have said. "It was extremely complex, Mr. Rutelli said.
One sticking
point was Ms. Whites insistence that the Italians pledge never to pursue
any other piece in her collection again.
Ultimately
Mr. Rutelli, who met twice with Ms. White last year, in
She had an
attitude of Why me? There are other collectors out there,
said one official who asked not to be identified for fear of offending Ms.
White by describing the talks. "The truth is, because shes
lent so many of her pieces, she was very visible. Other collectors tend to keep
their antiquities at home."
While the 1990
show of nearly 200 objects at the Met was a crowd pleaser, the exhibition
catalog stirred questioning among many archaeologists and scholars about the
objects provenance and the couples aggressive collecting practices.
In a 1999 study,
two British archaeologists, David Gill and Christopher Chippendale, wrote that
93 percent of the pieces in Glories of the Past had no known
provenance, suggesting that they were spirited away from archaeological sites.
And Italian investigators also relied heavily on the catalog to match
Levy-White objects to paper and photographic documentation from the Swiss
warehouse of Mr. Medici.
The evidence yielded
in the Medici warehouse raids has also been crucial to
Under the terms
of the accord, Ms. Whites Euphronios vessel will
remain in her possession for two more years before returning to
In the museum
world, much speculation now centers on where Ms. Whites priceless
antiquities collection " hundreds of objects
ranging from prehistoric Aegean artworks to artifacts from the Middle East and
As the Italian
investigation into artifacts in museum collections in the
He said only,
"The coming year will be full of surprises."