The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson

Author:Peter Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

It took a year, but it worked. At the end of March 2003, Symes offered to travel to Rome voluntarily to be interviewed at the Palazzo di Giustizia by Ferri. He had with him his Italian lawyer, Francesco Tagliaferri. (This name was a source of much amusement for everyone: in Italian “Tagliaferri” means “cut Ferri,” in the sense of a “shortened Ferri” or “Ferri cut down to size.”) Tagliaferri was also Tchacos’s lawyer.

Unsurprisingly, Symes was uptight about everything and Ferri had to squeeze information out of him. It was like being with the Bürkis all over again. Symes said he had known Medici for a very long time, since the 1980s, when the Italian would go to London for Sotheby’s sales. However, at the time he was interviewed, Symes claimed that he and his partner, Christo, hadn’t met Medici in more than ten years. Symes insisted that Medici was an expert in vases, that he had a very important collection and that “since they were famous and published vases, he did not need to certify their origin.” In particular, Symes confirmed that Medici could distinguish the painters who had painted particular vases. This was of course in direct contradiction of what Frida Tchacos had said and what others would say.

Xoilan, Symes said, was the company in whose name objects that he intended to collect (keep) were purchased, whereas for dealing he used another company, Robin Symes Limited. (This is directly contradicted by evidence we detail in Chapter 15.)2

Symes claimed there was nothing unusual or incriminating about the Polaroids found at Medici’s warehouse, even though they showed objects in fragments and covered in dirt. “Conserving the photos of an object which still has to be restored is simply to show the client the original condition of the object and how much and what kind of restoring work had been done. Many dealers give the purchaser the photos of the object before its restoration.” (Again, this is directly contradicted by Ferri’s later interrogations.) He confirmed that Felicity Nicholson was a great friend of his (he found her “molto simpatica”), and they frequently went out to dinner together. “She was incredibly honest and reserved in her work at Sotheby’s,” a description that hardly squares with her behavior in regard to the Lion Goddess, Sekhmet,s when she had asked Symes to smuggle it out of Italy. In fact, Symes rather spoiled his argument by admitting it was Nicholson who had prevailed on him to take part in the exercise.

Symes knew Hecht and had visited him when the latter lived in Rome. He had never visited him in Paris, and although he hadn’t done much business with him, Symes did confirm that in 1971 or 1972, he’d purchased a large bronze eagle from Hecht for $70,000–$75,000, then sold it to the Getty Museum. This, of course, is an important confirmation of an episode that Hecht had mentioned in his memoir, in his first “Medici version” of the route by which the Euphronios krater had arrived at the Met.

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