The Ill-Bought Urn

In its day it graced a Grecian banquet table and held perhaps seven gallons of wine. So proud were its makers, the painter Euphronios and the potter Euxitheos, that each signed his name boldly on the front. Even now, 2,500 years later, the calyx krater is not merely the best Greek vase in existence. It is the costliest, having been bought last summer by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for $1,000,000. As of last week, it was also by far the most controversial.

The furor began when the New York Times, advancing further in its holy war against the Met, charged that the vase was booty dug up by grave robbers at an Etruscan site north of Rome in 1971 and illegally sold to an expatriate American named Robert E. Hecht Jr. He in turn, so the story went, smuggled the vase out of Italy and sold it to the Met. In 1970 UNESCO adopted a draft prohibiting illicit traffic in art objects. The calyx krater would come under that provision, and both the U.S. and Italy have signed the pact.

The Met had originally said the vase came from a reputable dealer who got it from a European collection where it had rested since "before World War I." With the atmosphere already full of acrimony over Met policies (TIME, Feb. 26), the museum's officials were aloof and cautious. The curator of Greek and Roman Art, Dietrich von Bothmer, did admit that Hecht was the dealer. But at first he refused to identify Hecht's source, adding with either remarkable disingenuousness or extraordinary lack of judgment that the name was difficult to spell and he couldn't remember it. Eventually, under pressure, Bothmer produced that hard-to-spell name and some letters by the bowl's former owner, an Armenian coin collector in Beirut named Dikran A. Sarrafian.

Sarrafian, the letters said, had inherited the bowl, then in fragments, from his father, who acquired it "by exchange with an amateur against a collection of Greek and Roman coins in 1920 in London." Offered earlier and more willingly, that evidence might have settled things. But by now charges and countercharges were shooting back and forth across the Atlantic. Reporters were pursuing Hecht, Sarrafian, Met Director Thomas Moving and a restorer in Zurich named Fritz Buerki, who had expertly repaired the calyx krater for Hecht.

Reporters who reached Sarrafian, 68, found him a little vague. "My interest is in coins," he said in Beirut. "I care little for vases." He had really paid little attention to the calyx krater. The pieces had been in a hatbox from 1926, when his father died, until 1970, when he consigned the box to Hecht. There were some odd discrepancies in his story. The Met had said that Hecht only got an agent's 10% of the price. Sarrafian suggested otherwise. The Met said the vase had no missing parts. Sarrafian said there were pieces missing, some as large as a silver dollar.

Nobody could find Buerki in Zurich. But the man most in demand and least in supply was Robert Hecht. The tennis-playing heir to a Baltimore department-store fortune, Hecht lives in Rome and roams Europe in search of high-priced objets d'art. American museum officials, who have bought through him for years, see Hecht as a fine judge of ancient art and a reliable source. In Europe and farther east, views differ. Hecht in fact has been questioned in Italy for buying antiquities illegally. (He was subsequently acquitted.) On the same grounds he has been declared persona non grata by the Turkish government.

Hecht, clearly, was the key to the mystery. But when reporters began calling his home, his wife explained that he was "traveling." Not surprisingly, his travels took him, among other places, to Zurich, where the vase had been restored, and Beirut. He surfaced once to reaffirm the Met's story, disappeared, then announced through his lawyer in Rome first that he would soon have an important statement to make, later that he had changed his mind.

Meanwhile, the Italian press, police and government were variously aggrieved about what they regarded as the latest rape of their fast dwindling artistic patrimony. Rome's Il Messaggero deplored "the so-called men of culture who offer fabulous premiums to anyone who can land masterworks in America." Italian state television put an admitted tombarolo (grave robber) on the air who spoke of a beautiful Greek vase found in a tomb last year and sold to a "foreigner" for $160,000.

"Hot Air." Unofficially, Italy's police went further. They let it be known that men had been identified who had sold the calyx krater to Robert Hecht in 1971--along with a perhaps even more valuable Greek cup and some other objects. They had all been taken, it was said, from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri, 20 miles north of Rome. At week's end the Italian prosecutor concerned with the case advised four unidentified men to retain defense counsel, which merely meant that they might become witnesses or defendants in a trial if one occurs.

Met Director Hoving still dismisses the whole affair as "a lot of hot air" rising from the fierce jealousies that accompanied the million-dollar vase deal. He showed TIME sworn statements made by Sarrafian before authorities in Beirut on Feb. 19 attesting to the vase's origin and ownership, and he pointed out that so far no real evidence to the contrary has been offered.

The calyx krater was declared when it came into the U.S., so it is here legally, whatever its provenance in Europe. That makes it far less likely that the vase will ever be pried loose from the Met--like the Raphael portrait that was taken from the Boston Museum in 1971 and returned to Italy by the U.S. Bureau of Customs because customs agents claimed the painting had been smuggled into the U.S. without declaration. Hoving may have been right when he told TIME'S Leah Gordon, "We've got a great pot and we're going to keep it." But if the pot really proves to have been stolen, it is hard to predict what the Italian or the U.S. governments might do. Whatever happens, no one who has been involved in the affair will ever again say wholeheartedly, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

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