The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online Page A

about fifty pictures, and among them was one of a calyx krater by Asteas, a fourth-century BC Italian vase painter, and another of a very striking statue of Artemis. In Greek mythology, and according to Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek writers after Homer, Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and the sister of Apollo. She
loved hunting and dancing, and was one of the three virgin goddesses of Olympus. She was also notorious for her anger and jealousy, which led her to kill many others—humans, gods, and goddesses.
    To Conforti and his men it was immediately obvious that this statue was an exceedingly rare and valuable object indeed. All investigators in the Art Squad are given lessons in art history—in painting, sculpture, and drawing—by the superintendency of Italy’s Culture Ministry, and because they handle a lot of objects, and see a fair proportion of fakes, they quickly develop an “eye” for the quality of artifacts. The white marble Artemis was about four feet high and showed the goddess with hair braided across her forehead and falling down the side of her neck, striding out in a fulllength tunic and sandals. The tunic fell down her body in triangular folds, and there was a hunting strap across her breasts. Her features showed a slight smile as she looked directly ahead. Her arms were cut off at the elbows, but otherwise she was intact.
    The investigators knew she was Artemis for one simple reason—it was a classical image and three other near-identical versions were known, one in Naples, one in Florence, and one in Venice. All were in museums, and all were Roman copies, dating from the first century AD, of a lost archaic Greek original that dated to the fifth or sixth century BC. Since none of the statues in the three museums was missing, this Artemis was a major find. It might even be the original Greek Artemis. Given Camera’s links with the Naples area, in particular with Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, the photograph found in his car strongly suggested that the statue had perhaps been excavated in that area. Who could say what else had been purloined during the illegal dig of what was clearly a very important site? And so recovering this Artemis now became a major focus of the Art Squad. The photograph recovered from the glove compartment had some meat hooks in the background—the Artemis had been transferred from the ground to a butcher shop. Shortly afterward, however, in Camera’s apartment, the Carabinieri came across another photograph of the Artemis, against a different, and less striking, background. Clearly, Camera was intimately involved in trading this valuable and beautiful object.
    The second breakthrough as a result of the raid on Camera’s apartment came via the other names mentioned in the paperwork the Carabinieri confiscated. These names led the investigators in two directions. In the
first place, they led eventually to no fewer than seventy other raids, which unearthed hundreds of looted vases and other objects—and to the arrest of nineteen individuals, all of whom were found guilty at their subsequent trials.
    From our point of view, however, the second direction is more interesting. For among the names in the documentation in Camera’s apartment was that of Wanda d’Agata’s son, a man named Danilo Zicchi.
    He was raided toward the end of September, still as part of Operation Geryon, and in his apartment two very important discoveries were made. First, from the furniture, wallpaper, and other decorations, Conforti’s men realized that Zicchi’s apartment was the very place where the statue of Artemis had been photographed after it had left the butcher shop. Faced with this evidence, and the threat of some very fulsome and unpleasant Carabinieri attention, Zicchi decided to talk—up to a point. He admitted that his apartment had been used “for years” as a “warehouse” for looted antiquities, many of them