During the 16th century, the Roman market for antiquities became highly competitive. Competence and money were crucial, but so were unscrupulousness and a fighting spirit. In the words of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci, who acted as a Medici agent in Rome in the 1560s, antiquities were ‘a prey which many dogs were ready to catch’. Like many of his contemporaries, Ricci perceived the process of procuring artworks as a hunt performed against other voracious contenders. In such a battlefield, misbehaviour was the rule and collectors and their agents often circumvented papal legislation in order to achieve their goals.
Given that theft was the most common crime in 16th-century Rome, it is no wonder that antiquities were stolen and then sold illicitly. Many people were involved in this: diggers and stonecutters; restorers and antiquarians; and – perhaps surprisingly – cardinals and princes. Cardinal Ricci once again offers an example of how fluid the concepts of legality and illegality were. In 1569, he informed the Medici court that, among the antiquities he was going to send to Florence, there was a ‘beautiful head, that I suspect might have been stolen, because the man who has shown it to me by night wanted to be well paid for it and wanted to be assured that I would take it out of Rome’. The nocturnal negotiation and the request that the stolen head should leave Rome were clearly precautionary measures to avoid them being tracked down. But such suspicious provenance was not enough of a concern and Ricci did not hesitate to conclude the deal.
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