More than 80 paintings, including masterpieces by Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Christo and Giorgio de Chirico, confiscated from the mafia, are on display from Tuesday at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, saved by fine sleuths who track down the dirty money.
“Works intended to remain buried in the circuits of organized crime are finally returned to the community, assuming a symbolic role of resistance to crime,” explained prefect Maria Rosaria Lagana. Since September, she has headed the National Agency for the Administration of Property Seized from Organized Crime, which offers a platform allowing buyers to set their sights on confiscated property, including Ferrari cars or Harley-Davidsons.
If the latter are auctioned and accessible to everyone, part of the goods, such as apartments, houses and agricultural land, are allocated free of charge to public organizations and NGOs. As for the works exhibited in Milan, “these are goods which, obviously, could have been sold, but the choice was made to keep them in museums, because they have an important value”, declared Maria Rosaria Lagana to the AFP.
“It’s a renaissance for these works. It’s a bit like we’re pulling them out of the ground, like archaeologists, to display them in places where everyone can see them,” she said.
The exhibition “SalvArti, from confiscations to public collections” contains more than twenty works seized in 2016 from a boss of the ‘Ndrangheta, the powerful Calabrian mafia. In the small room dedicated to works confiscated by the court of Reggio Calabria, an Indian ink lithograph of Romeo and Juliet by the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-1989) adjoins “Piazza d’Italia”, a splendid oil on canvas by the Italian master Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).
The walls are covered with press clippings testifying to these spectacular seizures and videos from the financial police of Reggio Calabria play in a loop at the entrance to the exhibition. Around sixty other paintings come from a seizure ordered by the Rome court in 2013 as part of a gigantic fraud linked to an international money laundering network.
Among these works are a screen print by the pope of American pop art Andy Warhol (1928-1987) entitled “Summer Arts in the Parks” and the lithograph of a “Wrapped Venus” by Christo (1935-2020) for the Villa Borghese in Rome.
“The creativity and beauty of art freed from criminal hands are offered to the collective vision to promote culture, while stimulating awareness of the insidious nature of the mafia scourge,” summarized Maria Rosaria Lagana.
The mafia uses stolen works of art as currency in drug and arms trafficking. One of the most resounding thefts was that of the “Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence”, a painting by Caravaggio stolen from the San Lorenzo oratory in Palermo in 1969 and sought after since.
The exhibition, to which access is free, runs until January 26 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, before moving to the Palace of Culture in Reggio Calabria, from February 8 to April 27.
