Rutelli and True Deliver One-Two Punch to the Getty

Yesterday was the ultimate bad-news day for the J. Paul Getty Trust: Its nemesis, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, scored an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, to which the editors obligingly appended the headline “Rogue Gallery,” along with a photo of the Getty Villa. WSJ subscribers can find it here. The rest of you can get the text, in English, from the Italian Culture Ministry’s website, here. (Click on the link above the Wall Street Journal logo.)
Also yesterday, at her continuing trial in Rome on charges of antiquities trafficking, Marion True, the Getty Museum’s former antiquities curator, introduced as evidence her indignant letter to Getty officials that had been leaked last month to the LA Times. Details of yesterday’s court proceedings are reported in today’s NY Times.
After the LA Times leak, True’s lawyer, Harry Stang, had asserted that the letter had been intended to be kept private. What message is True sending now, by airing it in open court? Quite possibly this: “If I’m going down, you higher-ups (and former higher-ups), who knew full well what I was doing, are going down with me.”
As for Rutelli’s published punditry, it indicates that this ambitious and savvy politician is going to keep playing the patrimony-patriot card for all it’s worth. When it comes to strategic maneuvering, the art historians at the Getty and their legal advisors are simply out of their league. Michael Brand, the Getty Museum’s director, got his Op-Ed piece in the LA Times. Rutelli contrived to get his in an internationally respected forum.
His piece displays a politician’s talent for manipulating, if not distorting, the facts: He twice mentions “the 46 works we are waiting for,” despite the fact that the Getty has agreed to return 25 of them and added a 26th that the Italians hadn’t even sought. What’s more, it is still studying Italy’s request for the highly important Cult Statue of a Goddess (called the Morgantina Venus by the Italians), with an eye to possible return.
Rutelli claims that the Getty “received exhaustive and reliable documentation months ago from our technicians, archaeologists, legal experts and investigators,” regarding Italy’s claims. But is there really “exhaustive documentation” for every one of the contested works? No matter, because in Rutelli’s opinion, it’s not just a question of airtight evidence:
This is not a legal question, but a question of ethics. It is a matter of transparency in relations with the public and correct behavior in the antiquities market.
The only “correct behavior,” from the source countries’ standpoint, is to accede with alacrity to repatriation demands. But each case (and each object) needs to be considered on its own merits. Sometimes that takes study and time…and a measure of goodwill, which now seems to be in short supply.