Word: siviero
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Italy and the Forum in particular are becoming a conservationist's nightmare. "It's no longer a matter of patching up this or that situation," said Minister Rodolfo Siviero. "It's a general collapse...
...complexities of international law in the art world were demonstrated again by the U.S. customs decision in the matter of the Raphael Portrait of a Young Girl, triumphantly exhibited by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts only 20 months ago. Siviero protested that it had been illegally exported from Italy; the museum protested that it had done nothing wrong, but it was generally conceded that the picture had been smuggled through customs in a briefcase by one of the Boston's own curators. Goaded by Siviero, U.S. customs seized the painting and mulled over the issue for eight months...