Just days after being taken by Italy’s Carabinieri, a priceless painting ascribed to the Flemish Old Master Peter Paul Rubens has been returned to a Genoa exhibition. Police are expanding their probe to include an official export office in Pisa as they try to piece together exactly how the artwork was illegally exported from the country ten years ago.
Titled Around 1612–16, the oil on canvas, which is insured for €4 million, depicts the resurrected Christ appearing to his mother; it also has a kneeling Madonna wearing a blue mantle. Since October, it had been on display at Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale alongside 18 autograph Rubens pieces. On Friday, a local Carabinieri art hit squad removed the painting.
The two proprietors of the business, the accountant, and his son are all Italian citizens, and they are all charged with unlawfully exporting the business and money laundering. Investigators assert that after purchasing the picture for €300,000 from the affluent Italian Cambiaso family in 2012, the owners falsely claimed it was only worth €25,000 so it could be shipped to Prague in 2014. To increase the work’s market worth, they later staged transactions through businesses they had established abroad.
2015 saw the discovery of an original Madonna figure that had been concealed by the artist by restorers using x-ray technology. To unveil the original Madonna, restorers controversially chose to remove surface paint.
The sculpture may not be by Rubens, according to art critic and current undersecretary to the ministry of culture Vittorio Sgarbi, who also criticised the Carabinieri for sequestering the piece. Sgarbi wrote in a memo that was quoted by the Italian press, “I invite those who carried out the preliminary investigations [on the alleged plot] to avoid humiliating mistakes by exercising more caution and rigour in their conclusions. The legitimacy of the piece is “not up for question,” according to statements made by Anna Orlando, co-curator of the Genoa exhibition, as quoted by La Repubblica.