Francesco Rutelli
© AFP/ANSA/FileROME (AFP) - "We are surprised and disappointed," Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli told AFP in the latest salvo of a long-running dispute with what is one of the world's richest museums.
"Our position was clear. There was absolutely not an agreement. There was a draft memorandum describing the areas of consensus," Rutelli said.
The minister insisted that the fate of the Cult Statue of Goddess, often referred to as the Aphrodite, and the Statue of a Victorious Youth, known as the Getty Bronze, was still on the table before the Getty announced Tuesday that it had broken off negotiations.
Addressing a news conference earlier Thursday, Rutelli said: "If they want to return to Italy those 26 works that they have already agreed to consider trafficked, so much the better.
"But the duty of our government is to make clear that all the museums of the world exhibiting works stolen from Italy must return them."
Rutelli was responding to a letter from Getty director Michael Brand stating that insufficient evidence existed to back Italy's claims of ownership to the items.
"I cannot return objects, like the Statue of a Victorious Youth, to which Italy has -- by its own admission -- no legal claim, or objects for which there is insufficient or inconclusive evidence to support the Italian claim," Brand wrote.
The statue was found by Italian fishermen in international waters, but officials say it should be returned because it was illegally exported.
Rutelli said Thursday: "Legally there is no doubt that (both) are Italy's," adding that the Getty had "the moral obligation" to hand them over.
"So many important American institutions have decided to give us back works of art and archeology even before a formal agreement was concluded," he told AFP, hailing agreements with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and Boston's Fine Arts Museum.
"Not only MOMA and the BFA but other public and private collections have contacted us to return all the stolen art," Rutelli said.
The agreements stepped up cooperation between the institutions in areas such as information exchange, scholarship, conservation, archaeological investigation and exhibition planning. Rutelli noted that Italy would be making a "long-term loan of a very important statue" to the Boston museum.
Rutelli will travel to New York and Boston next week "to celebrate the agreements" with the two museums, he said.
As for the year-long dispute with the Getty, he said the next step was "up to them".
Getty director Brand said in the letter that he was "deeply saddened" by the dispute.
The museum set up by US oil billionaire and collector J. Paul Getty insists it never knowingly bought illegally uncovered artifacts.
It is paying for the defence of its former antiquities curator, Marion True, who is standing trial in Rome for conspiring to traffick in stolen antiquities.
If she is found guilty, the Getty will be required to turn over the objects, according to Italian culture ministry lawyer Maurizio Fiorilli.
"The pieces will come to Italy not as a concession on the part of the Getty but as a seizure, the result of a procedure that is part of our legal process," Fiorilli told The New York Times.
©AFP