Results for “italy”

The Caravaggio Nativity, Palermo

In 1969 Caravaggio's 'Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence' was crudely cut from its frame in a Palermo oratory. Long linked to the Sicilian Mafia, it remains one of the world's most-wanted missing paintings.

The Euphronios Krater Returned to Italy

In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record $1 million for a dazzling sixth-century BC Greek vase painted by Euphronios. Decades later it was proven to have been looted from an Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri — and in 2008 the Met returned it to Italy.

The Medici Archive Investigation

In 1995, investigators raided a warehouse in the Geneva Freeport and uncovered the archive of dealer Giacomo Medici — thousands of Polaroids of freshly looted objects that became a Rosetta Stone for the antiquities trade and drove restitutions from museums around the world.

The 1911 Theft of the Mona Lisa

On the morning of 21 August 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the walls of the Louvre. For twenty-eight months it was gone — and in its absence it became an icon.

The Getty Museum Repatriation Cases

The J. Paul Getty Museum, the wealthiest art institution in the world, was forced to return around 40 looted antiquities to Italy and Greece after investigators traced them to illicit excavations — and to put its own curator on trial.

Vincenzo Peruggia

An Italian handyman and former Louvre employee who, in 1911, walked out of the museum with the Mona Lisa concealed beneath his workman's smock. He kept the painting in his Paris apartment for over two years, claiming a patriotic desire to return it to Italy. His attempt to sell it to a Florentine dealer led to his arrest and to the theft that made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world.

Robert Hecht

American antiquities dealer long suspected of being a linchpin of the illicit trade between Mediterranean tomb-robbers and the world's great museums. He sold the Euphronios krater to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 and was later tried in Italy alongside Giacomo Medici and Getty curator Marion True; the case against him lapsed on the statute of limitations before a verdict. He died in 2012. (image: Hecht and the Euphronios krater he sold to the Met.)

Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen

Painted for Van Gogh's mother, stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 and recovered in Italy in 2016.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Encyclopedic and immense, the Met has in recent decades faced sustained scrutiny over the provenance of antiquities in its collection, returning looted objects to Italy, Greece, Cambodia, and beyond.

Oratory of San Lorenzo

The Palermo oratory from which Caravaggio's 'Nativity' was cut from its frame in 1969 and lost forever.

Parma-geddon Averted: The Carabinieri Bring Three Masterpieces Home

The Tourist Who Sat on the Crystal Chair

A visitor lowered himself onto Nicola Bolla's Swarovski-crystal-encrusted 'Van Gogh' chair to strike a pose. The chair, which was art and not furniture, promptly gave way beneath him.

Moretto's Double Disaster

A visitor lost her footing and punched a hand clean through a double-sided sixteenth-century processional banner by the Renaissance master Moretto — damaging both painted faces at once.