Rory Carroll in Rome Friday August 3, 2001 The Guardian
An Italian court has shaken the apparent impunity of those who loot archaeological sites by jailing an 80-year-old dealer in stolen antiquities. Renzo Canavesi di Sagno was sentenced to two years and fined £12.7m for helping to spirit a 2,500-year-old marble statue of the Greek goddess Aphrodite from Sicily to the US, via Switzerland and Britain.
Detectives uncovered a criminal network after spotting the statue in the Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, which had paid an unnamed dealer in London £7.5m for it. Italy's heritage has been ravaged by looters in recent decades but jail sentences are rare, and this has fostered a sense of impunity, detectives said. The newspaper La Sicilia described the sentence passed by a court in Enna, central Sicily, as an overdue strike against the gangs which illegally export tens of thousands of artefacts every year. The 2.2-metre statue was plundered by a tombarolo (tomb robber) in 1970 from the archaeological site of Morgantina, a one-time Greek colony near Enna. Canavesi di Sagno was paid £290,000 in the 1980s to arrange shipment to another dealer in Switzerland, who passed it on to London. The Getty, resented by rival museums for its deep pockets and aggressive acquisitions, returned the statue to Sicily in March 1999 and tightened its buying policy. The tombarolo who found the statue, a pensioner in the town of Aidone, was spared jail in return for helping the investigators, and for legal reasons he cannot be named. The Aphrodite stretches out her right arm while gathering up the train of her robe with the left. Experts now believe that the bust and legs are fakes commissioned by the looters in 1972 from a master forger in Rome. A full figure would fetch a higher price, they believed. The feet, hands and face are considered genuine. Archaeologists suspect that the statue was dismembered by its owner in the third century BC to make it easier to bury and hide from the advancing Roman soldiers, who were busy annihilating all the Greek colonies in Sicily. The Italian art police have had a spate of successes recently. A statue of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, was retrieved from the US earlier this year, after a seven-year international hunt. Last month they arrested 29 people, including housewives, bank tellers and labourers, suspected of smuggling jewels, bronze statues and ancient coins worth £13.2m. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Scourge of Art World Returns to Clinic
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's art galleries breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday after a deranged man who destroys priceless paintings by hurling acid on them returned to a psychiatric hospital after a two-day jaunt. ``It is one less danger,'' said the director of Hamburg's Kunsthalle art gallery, Uwe Schneede. ``But I always worry something might happen (to the paintings).'' Hans-Joachim Bohlmann, 63, known as the ``acid assassin,'' damaged 56 works of art including church altars and paintings by old masters such as Albrecht Duerer and Rembrandt, starting in the late 1970s. His favored technique was pouring a bottle of sulfuric acid over the works and during his ``career'' is estimated to have caused around $121 million worth of damage. After his release from a five-year jail sentence, Bohlmann attacked another three paintings in Munich in 1988. He was finally sent to a psychiatric institute in 1990 after being sentenced for a second time. The police were immediately informed on Monday after Bohlmann failed to return from day release from the psychiatric clinic in Hamburg, and museums and galleries all over Germany were alerted. ``He planned to come back from the beginning,'' said Guntram Knecht, director of the ward where Bohlmann is cared for. ``He visited old places and parks which he knew from earlier in his life. He didn't go to any churches or museums.'' http://dailynews.yahoo.com/