New York justice returns 58 stolen works of art to Italy
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With a total value of “nearly $19 million”these pieces had been trafficked internationally to the United States and to the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art.
New York justice returned Tuesday, September 6 to Italy 58 looted and stolen works of art, some of which date from Roman antiquity and which had been the subject of international traffic to the United States and at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following a ceremony with Italian Consul General Fabrizio Di Michele, New York State Attorney for the Borough of Manhattan Alvin Bragg issued a statement announcing the restitution to the “Italian people” of 58 antiques for a value of “nearly $19 million”. According to Alvin Bragg, 21 of these coins had been “seized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (Met), one of the largest and most prestigious art museums on the planet.
“These 58 pieces represent thousands of years of rich history; yet traffickers across Italy have resorted to looters to steal them and line their pockets”did he declare. “They had been enthroned for too long in museums, residences and art galleries that had no right of ownership”, denounced the prosecutor Bragg. The works had been trafficked by “Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, Pasquale Camera and Edoardo Almagia”who have them “sold to Michael Steinhardt, one of the greatest collectors of ancient art in the world”denounced Alvin Bragg.
700 pieces returned to 14 countries
Since 2020, New York State Justice has engaged in extensive art restitution: from summer 2020 to the end of 2021, at least 700 pieces were returned to 14 countries, including the Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece or Italy. The American collector Michael Steinhardt was thus forced to return in 2021 around 180 antiques stolen in recent decades, worth 70 million dollars. An agreement between the New York justice and Steinhardt had allowed him to escape an indictment but it prohibits him for life from acquiring works on the legal art market.
Among the works returned to Rome, there is a “200 BC marble head of Athena stolen from central Italy, trafficked from Giacomo Medici’s ring and finally landed at the Met in 1996”. But also a bust of a man in bronze dating from the 1st century BC or AD, which “had been trafficked by Parisian art dealer Robert Hecht to another dealer in Switzerland before ultimately being sold to an individual in a New York county”. The Consul General of Italy, Fabrizio Di Michele, hailed “the intense and fruitful cooperation between the Italian and American authorities, in particular with the New York prosecutor’s office, for the restitution of looted or stolen antiquities”.
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