Word: siviero
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...undercover man was advised on how to establish his credentials as a crooked art dealer by two former members of Scotland Yard's art squad. The names of some suspected thieves were supplied by the late Rodolfo Siviero, who directed Italy's attempts to recover its stolen art. Also secretly cooperating with Watson were five major U.S. and British art dealers...
DIED. Rodolfo Siviero, 72, Italy's national art sleuth whose life mission was to recover his nation's stolen treasures, particularly those pilfered by the Nazis; in Florence. An agent of the underground Italian resistance during World War II, Siviero traced at least 2,000 works of art throughout the world in his lifetime, and saw that they were safely returned. Next year the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence will open a special museum with 200 pieces of Italian art, mostly paintings, that the relentless Siviero recovered after they vanished from the looted, private collections of Adolf Hitler...
Italy has the dubious distinction of suffering more thefts than any other nation. Clearly the pattern has changed, having moved from the spontaneous to the corporate. Rodolfo Siviero, the government's chief investigator of art theft, roundly states that "it's an international traffic conducted by a number of big-time receivers abroad." These 50 or so men, he believes, are not art dealers but organizers of what amounts to theft-for-investment. They commission thefts, receive the goods, wait for them to cool (for years, if need be) and then discreetly launder them through a network...
...zanne's Thieves and the Donkey (see color page), that not one person in 10,000 would remember seeing on the museum wall years before. The chains of documentation for sales of art works are still remarkably weak. But sometimes a thief blunders and takes something unsalably famous. Siviero claims this is what happened in 1971, with the theft of Masaccio's Madonna with Child and Memling's Portrait of a Gentleman from Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. "The thieves found that even after two or three years they couldn't sell them, and we were able...
...other hand, if a crank or an ignoramus took the Urbino paintings, they may have been jettisoned or destroyed by now, in panic. Siviero is inclined to discount the concrete-bunker theory-the mad millionaire gloating over stolen masterpieces in solitude. The collector, he believes, "wants to be able to enjoy the possession and to show it off." That leaves the extortion hypothesis: the work of art taken either to get a ransom or some political favor. In fact, however, the few ransom demands that have been made have turned out to be phony. Even if they were real, they...