The Italians’ new evidence about the krater’s origins emerges at a time of heightened controversy over the ethics of antiquities acquisitions, with Italy, Greece and other source countries pressing claims for the return of rare items they say were illegally removed. Medici, in a recent interview in Rome, also denied the account. Hecht said Thursday that this version from his memoir involving Medici was a fiction. “It proves, as the final nail in the coffin, where it came from,” Hoving said. Thomas Hoving, who acquired the krater when he was the Met’s director, said Thursday in an interview that Hecht’s memoir is “a very important piece of evidence.”
In this account, he makes no reference to documentation establishing that the object had been legally excavated and exported from Italy. He then headed straight to Zurich, he writes, where he left the krater with a restorer before heading back to Rome to go on a family ski trip. Hecht says he offered Medici 1.5 million Swiss francs - about $380,000 at the time - for the krater on the spot, making a cash down payment of about $40,000. Within an hour, Hecht writes, the two men flew to Milan and caught a train north to Lugano, Switzerland, where Medici had the bowl in a safe-deposit box. Medici turned up one morning at Hecht’s apartment in Rome and showed him a Polaroid photograph of a krater signed by Euphronios, a master vase painter of ancient Greece, the memoir says.
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