The Plunder of the New Barbarians

On the morning of Feb. 6, Giovanni Spadolini walked into a committee room in Rome's Chamber of Deputies and got ready to debate. Three months earlier, Aldo Moro's center-left government had given him the newly invented and resonant-sounding portfolio of Ministro dei Beni Culturali e Ambientali (Minister of Cultural and Environmental Resources). Since then, Spadolini had been striving to get more money and protection for Italy's impoverished and vulnerable museums. Two new bills were ready to be argued. "Just as the debate was beginning," Spadolini recalls, "a colleague in the chamber came up to me and said, 'It's too late.' "

That afternoon the stricken minister scrambled out of a helicopter in the hill town of Urbino to visit the site of the worst art theft since World War II. Between midnight and 2 in the morning of Feb. 6, three paintings had been taken from Urbino's 15th century Ducal Palace. One was a portrait of an unknown noblewoman, nicknamed The Mute, by Raphael. The other two were by Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation and the Madonna of Senigallia.

Loss and Lobotomy. It was news to lock any art lover's spine with outrage. Raphael and Piero? Ever since Piero della Francesca was "resurrected" in the late 19th century, he has been to many people the epitome of 15th century thought: the great artificer of volume and silvery space, the very essence of the relationship between mathematics and nature in which the quattrocento's self-image was rooted. No Renaissance painter has spoken more eloquently to the 20th century than Piero, with his vision of a sublimely abstract order dwelling in a thicket of concrete and manifest forms--figures, architecture, drapery; and because there were so few known paintings by him (apart from the great fresco cycle in Arezzo), the night's work in Urbino seemed less of a theft than a lobotomy. "The theft of the Raphael and the Piero della Francesca masterpieces is a loss beyond measurement," said Italy's leading art historian and critic Giulio Carlo Argan. "It's as though all the existing copies of Dante's Divine Comedy and the verses of Petrarch were suddenly to disappear from the face of the earth."

Followed as it was by the theft of 28 minor Impressionist and Post-Impressionist canvases from the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan, the Urbino disaster has raised, as never before, a swell of loss and indignation in Italy. It made clear that art theft has become one of the nation's industries. Since World War II roughly 44,000 works of art of all kinds have been stolen in Italy. They range from 13th century Sienese Madonnas to chipped candlesticks, from the Ephebus of Selinunte (a superb archaic Greek bronze kouros lifted on behalf of a Sicilian group by a dim-witted legman who received $700 for his trouble) to the Greco-Etruscan bric-a-brac that makes its weekly appearance in the Rome flea market. Of that 44,000, no fewer than 26,000 have been taken in the past eight years. The immediate postwar losses were severe; the pandemic corruption in the bureaucracy ensured that many a masterpiece stolen or extorted by the Fascists, and now serenely ensconced in American museums, got its export papers as a favor to this or that transatlantic dealer. But recently the curve has become exponential: a total of 5,843 works of art were reported stolen in 1972, 8,520 in 1973 and 10,952 last year.

Staff Problem. It is like taking candy from a cripple. "The personnel in charge of the museums, galleries and archaeological sites is absolutely insufficient," fumes Spadolini. Italy has 232 national and more than 300 local museums, of which only six have alarm systems. There are 3,850 guards on the state payroll, and these custodi have never been renowned for vigilance, speed or immunity to bribes. The staff problem is such that Venice's greatest gallery, the Accademia, had to close for a month last year for want of personnel. The 72,000 Italian churches are even more vulnerable. In Rome six months ago, two bandits hid inside S. Pietro in Vincoli (where Michelangelo's Moses is displayed) until closing time. Then they seized the lone 60-year-old sacristan, trussed him up like a goose and locked him into a confessional, cut two large Baroque canvases from their frames and strolled off into the night. In 1968 two exceptional 13th century works--a Madonna and Child painted by Niccolo di Segna and a polychrome sculpture by Ramo di Paganello--were stolen from the Church of Monte Siepi at the Abbey of S. Galgano near Siena; they have not been seen since. In 1973 Caravaggio's Nativity was stolen from the high altar of the Oratory of S. Lorenzo in Palermo; it too is still missing.

Against such depredations, Italy's paramilitary carabinieri have had their successes. After one of the few undisputed paintings by Giorgione, the 6%-ft. by 4 1/2-ft. Madonna with Saints Liberale and Francis, was stolen from the cathedral of his home town of Castelfranco in 1972, the police found it within ten days an hour's drive away, in Padua. In 1970 thieves took a Giovanni Bellini, a Holy Family by Antonio Allegri and a Portrait of a Youth attributed to Antonello da Messina from the Malaspina museum in Pa via; only the last remains at large.

Art thefts, of course, are not confined to Italy. In May 1973, during the opening of an ethnographical exhibition in the Konstmuseum at Gothenburg in Sweden, someone made off with a major Matisse, the Girl in White. It was so crudely sliced out of its frame that Matisse's signature was left dangling on a flap of canvas from the stretcher. The painting is still lost.

In France, where museum security is tighter than Italy's, most of the recent thefts have been from private collections; the preferred targets are tapestries and minor (hence easily negotiable) "blue chip" Ecole de Paris pictures: Rouault, Modigliani, Vuillard, Bonnard, Cezanne and the like. Major art thefts, whether for ransom or resale, have declined in England over the past few years, thanks to the formation of Scotland Yard's highly efficient art squad in 1968. "It simply does not pay criminals to steal works of art in this country," says London Art Dealer Hugh Leggatt. "The police in Britain have always been far ahead of their foreign counterparts in detecting and recovering lost works of art." In its first four years, the art squad--which now keeps a computer index of 5,000 missing works--recovered about $30 million worth of paintings, sculpture and antiques.

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 of "honest" art dealers strung between Switzerland, Germany and the U.S.

Cranks and Bunkers. For this scenario, the Milan theft would be ideal --minor works by famous names, such as Cezanne'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 to recover them." He hopes that the fame of the Raphael and the Pieros will likewise result in their recovery. "The thieves couldn't sell that Raphael if they waited ten or 100 years."

On the 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 would not work, Siviero claims. "If a child is snatched, the family will do anything to get it back. But there is no such basic emotional attachment to a painting. And the state certainly would not --must not--pay ransom."

For all this, it is easy to blame the thieves, the fences, the government or even Italy itself. The nation is burdened with the cornucopia of a past that its present cannot protect or even use coherently. But the blame also lies elsewhere. For the past 15 years, every literate person in Europe and the U.S. has been molded by the incessant pressure of propaganda about art as a commodity: by museums which flaunt their directorial machismo by advertising the prices of their million-dollar acquisitions; by witless journalists whose only peg for discussing art is its price; by collectors who grub for investment; and by the horde of dealers, ranging from the little sharks to the dignified auction-room gents with faces like silver teapots, who have striven to give art the primary function of bullion. The present epidemic of art theft is ultimately their responsibility. In one day last week, in one Italian district--the Abruzzi--thieves made off with a 12th century Madonna and Child, a 13th century reclining Madonna and a 14th century silver reliquary attributed to Giacomo di Sulmona. In the whole week more than 180 works of art were stolen in Italy; an average of 27 a day, one every six hours from churches in Tuscany alone. One may safely bet that by 1980 most of these things--some trivial, some precious in their testimony to lost hierarchies of consciousness--will have gone through the big auction houses or been sold by "respectable" private dealers in Europe or the U.S. That is what the art market comes down to: a brutish mugging that never stops. Urbino has turned every public work of art into a paranoid object.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.