Getty's Stolen Goddess Finally Returned to Sicily

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The Aphrodite statue of disputed origin which came on the antiquities market in 1988 and once displayed in the Getty Museum has now been returned to Sicily (Jason Felch, 'Getty ships Aphrodite statue to Sicily', Los Angeles Times March 23, 2011). The statue was taken off display in December and freighted under an Italian diplomatic seal aboard an Alitalia flight to Sicily where it arrived on Thursday. From there it travelled with an armed police escort by ship and truck to the small hilltop town of Aidone, Sicily, where it arrived Saturday to waiting crowds. The town lies next to the remains of the ancient Greek colony of Morgantina, where it is believed that the object had lain buried in archaeological deposits for centuries before it was illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy.

When the Getty bought the Aphrodite for $18 million in 1988, the statue's importance outweighed the signs of its illicit origins. "The proposed statue of Aphrodite would not only become the single greatest piece of ancient art in our collection; it would be the greatest piece of Classical sculpture in this country and any country outside of Greece and Great Britain," wrote former antiquities curator Marion True in proposing the acquisition. For years, the museum clung to the implausible story that the statue had been in the family of a former Swiss policeman, Renzo Canavesi, for more than 50 years after being purchased by his father in Paris in the 1930s.

The credibility of that cover story was destroyed with the appearance of evidence of its illicit origins and an alleged link between its appearance on the market through the agency of organized criminal activity.

In 2006, private detectives hired by the Getty uncovered more than a dozen photos of the statue. One shows fragments of the goddess scattered in a pile of dirt on a brown tile floor. In another, pieces of varying sizes were lined up in rows on a large, thick plastic sheet. Another photo showed the statue's marble face still encrusted with grime. It is not clear who took the photos or where they were taken. But the fact that the statue had been in fragments and covered in dirt as recently as the early 1980s — the date on the photographs — was seen as clear evidence that it had been illegally excavated not long before the Getty bought it. The investigators [...] also found evidence connecting Canavesi with an alleged Sicilian antiquities smuggler whom investigators were told had ties to organized crime [...] Canavesi told investigators that he was a friend of Orazio di Simone, who in 1989 Italian authorities charged with smuggling the Aphrodite out of Italy. (The case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.) When the Getty's investigators tried to interview Di Simone, they were warned against it by Italian authorities, who suggested he had ties to the Mafia. In an interview [...], Di Simone denied the charge and any involvement with the statue.

It turns out, as a result of a 2007 LA Times investigation which revealed the existence of the photos, that Getty officials had turned down an opportunity to see them a decade earlier. Only then, reportedly, did the Getty send an attorney and a museum official to Switzerland to secure copies of the photos, apparently from Canavesi, and confirm they were of the object they had bought (these images have still not been made public).

The story of the unravelling of the illicit origins of the "Getty" Aphrodite is described in a forthcoming book about the dispute - "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum". The authors are Jason Felch and former LA Times staff writer Ralph Frammolino, the book will be published May 24 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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