Sketch Artist 
Whose Art Is It, Anyway?
In February two stolen frescoes paid for and restored by Dominique de Menil will be unveiled in a new Eastern Orthodox chapel in Houston. The issue of whether they belong in Texas is controversial—but the story of how they ended up here is downright Byzantine.
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When Mrs. de Menil returned home to Houston, she immediately got in touch with Herbert Brownell, a New York attorney and former U.S. attorney general, for advice about the legality of buying the frescoes. Brownell responded that the law was uncertain on the subject. Furthermore, he didn’t know whether the laws of Germany, where the objects had been offered for sale, or the laws of the United States, where the Menil Foundation is based, would apply. Finally, while the United Nations had established rules for recovering national treasures, it wasn’t clear whether Dikmen’s frescoes fell into that category.
Deciding to take the most cautious approach possible, Mrs. de Menil asked Brownell to conduct a search for the frescoes’ true owners. Brownell sent a letter to the embassies of nine countries that had once been part of the Byzantine Empire, alerting them to the fact that some ancient frescoes had recently come on the market. “While our clients have no reason to believe that there is any impediment to the purchase of these paintings,” it stated, “given their present location in Western Europe, they feel that the importance and quality of the material is such that it would be appropriate and correct to approach the relevant authorities in all the countries that might be concerned, in order that any possible claims to these paintings could come to light.”
Meanwhile, Davezac began to suspect that the frescoes might be from Cyprus, rather than Turkey, as Dikmen had claimed, because of their clear stylistic parallels to other works from that island. Indeed, when Andreas Jacovides, Cyprus’ ambassador to the United States, got Brownell’s letter, he immediately contacted his government. “We got the reply ‘Hold it, they are from such-and-such a church in the occupied part of the island,’” Jacovides remembered in a recent phone conversation. Two other countries—Turkey and Lebanon—also claimed ownership of the frescoes, but only Cyprus was able to back up its claim with documentation.
In the years following Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the art market was flooded with objects torn from the island’s ancient churches and monuments. After Turkey gained control of the northern half of the island, there was widespread looting of cultural works from that region, particularly from Greek Orthodox sites. Many of the robberies were methodically carried out, indicating that international art-theft rings had probably moved into the area. Ambassador Jacovides learned that the frescoes Mrs. de Menil was interested in had been stolen from a small thirteenth-century church near the town of Lysi, in northern Cyprus. Sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, thieves apparently visited the church, cut the frescoes into 38 segments, glued cloth to their surfaces, and ripped the painted plaster from the ceiling in pieces. In other words, the frescoes were war booty.
Once Mrs. de Menil learned that the frescoes had been stolen from Cyprus, she had to decide whether to inform law enforcement officials or deal with the thieves. Because she feared that going to the police might cause Aydin Dikmen to destroy the frescoes or sell off the pieces to different parties to get rid of evidence linking him to the robbery, she decided to make a deal. In the summer of 1983 she entered into protracted negotiations with Cypriot government officials and with His Beatitude Archbishop Chrysostomos, the head of the Church of Cyprus, even visiting the island in person in an effort to gain permission to keep the frescoes in Houston temporarily instead of returning them to their homeland right away. By December of that year, she had obtained the approval of the Cypriot officials to pay Dikmen a sum that she called a “ransom” (when I asked her how much it was, she said she couldn’t remember), even though a final agreement about the frescoes’ fate was still pending. “We faced the difficult decision of whether to say, ‘Wait, it’s stolen property’—in which case we would run the risk of having the frescoes go underground—or making some kind of arrangement,” said Ambassador Jacovides. “It was felt at the time that it would be better, for the sake of preserving the frescoes, to have the arrangement.”
Funds were deposited into the Swiss escrow account that December. The following month, the 38 segments of fresco were transported from Munich to London, where they were stored in a shipping warehouse. Employees of the Menil Foundation examined the segments and had them analyzed to ensure their authenticity. In July Mrs. de Menil had the pieces transported from the warehouse to a rented loft space in London, where she left them in the care of Laurence Morrocco, a leading expert in the restoration of Byzantine art. When Morrocco first saw the frescoes, the cloth that the thieves had glued on them was still attached to many of the pieces. He was able to remove the cloth successfully, but then he had to affix a protective paper covering to prevent damaging the frescoes while he handled them. Because the protective covering obscured the images on the fragments, Morrocco didn’t know whether he had joined the fragments at the right points until he was near the end of the restoration effort, which took almost four years.
“My nightmare was that some of the lines which crossed the saw cuts would not connect perfectly, and the whole rhythm of the painting would be lost,” he wrote in a book about the frescoes that the Menil Foundation has published. “The effect would be like a great violinist playing a fine instrument that was slightly out of tune: Instead of something uplifting, a discord would be created.”
Because northern Cyprus was still a military zone, Morrocco was not able to visit Lysi until he had almost completed the restoration project. His most difficult problem was estimating the shape of the small church’s dome and apse; although the diameter of the dome was relatively easy to calculate, he couldn’t determine its curvature, as most of the fragments had lost their original shape after they were removed, and some were even bent so that they curved the wrong way. Morrocco began by building a dome out of Styrofoam. He then made copies of the fresco segments out of a flexible polyurethane material and reshaped the dome until the polyurethane pieces fit together neatly when placed face down on top of it. Once he had determined the original curvature of the fragments, Morrocco rigged up a steam bath to ease the pieces back into shape. Finally, he made a polyurethane shell that looked like a bowl, and laid the fresco fragments into it. Once they were joined together temporarily, in what he hoped was the correct fashion, he carefully removed the frescoes and applied a strong backing to give them rigidity: First a layer of cotton muslin was attached, then a layer of canvas, then sheets of polyvinyl chloride. Essentially the same process was repeated to assemble the fragments from the church’s apse. The final layer would consist of an extremely strong fiberglass commonly used in the hulls of racing boats.
Before Morrocco applied the layer of fiberglass, however, he was able to arrange a visit to Lysi. He spent several days searching for the church before he finally found it. “It was as if it had just happened,” he wrote of the scene he found inside. “The saw cuts were still visible in the plaster left behind when the fragments were ripped off. I could see how the thieves had cut crudely around the circumference of the base of the dome, leaving the angels’ ankles and feet on the wall. Small pieces of the fresco lay scattered around the floor amidst dirt, straw, and sheep droppings.”
After measuring the church’s interior, Morrocco was horrified to discover that while he had recreated the dome exactly, he had miscalculated the width of the apse: It was fifteen inches less than he had thought. When he returned to London, he had to slowly squeeze his reconstruction together until it conformed to the right dimensions. Now he was ready to remove the frescoes’ protective covering. Special scaffolding had to be built inside the loft to allow Morrocco and his assistants to work on the interior of the dome and the apse. “We worked in sections, gradually loosening the layers of facing paper by wetting the surface with cotton swabs soaked in solvent,” Morrocco wrote. “Masks had to be worn, as the fume build-up inside the dome was considerable.” He was inordinately relieved when it looked as though he had correctly put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back together. “[M]iracle of miracles—everything seemed to join up. Even those difficult, almost vertical, lines on the angels’ wings seemed to run smoothly across the saw cuts . . .”
In April 1988, after Morrocco had filled in the cuts and repainted the damaged areas, the frescoes were crated up and flown to Houston. “And then for the first time I saw the frescoes in their totality,” said Mrs. de Menil. “I was not disappointed.”
AMERICAN REGULATIONS CONCERNING stolen art, which were murky when Dominique de Menil acquired the Lysi frescoes, became more explicit after 1989. That year, the Republic of Cyprus successfully sued an inexperienced Indianapolis art dealer named Peg Goldberg to recover some mosaics that had been stolen from the sixth-century church of Panagia Kanakaria in the village of Lythrankomi. Goldberg had bought the mosaics from Aydin Dikmen the year before. Her possession of stolen artifacts had come to the attention of Cypriot government officials after she attempted to sell her mosaics to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu for $20 million—$19 million more than she had paid for them. Cyprus’ subsequent case against Goldberg, which became the subject of a two-part article in The New Yorker, turned on her failure to diligently search for the mosaics’ rightful owners. While Goldberg had contacted several countries to see if the mosaics had been reported stolen, she had neglected to contact the Republic of Cyprus.
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