By ALVARO BLANCO
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office on Tuesday returned a pair of stolen art works, a statue and a painting worth more than $500,000 to the Italian government decades after their disappearance.
The two works include a 5th or 6th Century B.C.E. Etruscan bronze sculpture of Herakles, commonly known as Hercules, and an 18th Century painting by Giambattista Tiepolo, “The Holy Trinity Appearing to Saint Clement.”
The art works were returned to Warrant Officer Angelo Ragusa, of the Rome Office of the Archaeological Section of the Carabinieri Tuela Patrimonio Culturale,at the U.S. Attorney’s headquarters.
“These two works of art were stolen from their owners many decades ago and through shadowy channels arrived in the United States,” said Richard Zabel, Deputy Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Both the Tiepolo painting and the Etruscan sculpture represent Italy’s rich cultural history and today will be returned to their homeland.”
The Etruscan statue was stolen January 7, 1964 from the Museo Oliveriano in Pesaro, Italy, along with several other items including Ivory tablets. An art dealer in Switzerland sold the sculpture to a New York dealer. In the 1970s the sculpture was purchased in New York, where it was put on sale in the 1990s. The sculpture was discovered by Italian Authorities in 2012 and recovered by the US Attorney’s office in October 2014.
The Tiepolo painting was stolen from a private home in Turin, Italy in August 1982. Valued at 500,000 euros the painting reappeared again in 2013, at an online auction by Christie’s Inc.
“For decades, two significant pieces of Italian heritage have been on the run, elusive, and out of reach, until today,” said FBI assistant director Diego Rodriguez.
The stolen paintings case was handled jointly by the Attorney’s Office Money Laundering and Asset Forfeiture Unit, the FBI and the Washington Bureau of INTERPOL, who brought the painting’s whereabouts to light.
“Today’s repatriation ceremony is yet another example of our office’s dedication to help other nations reclaim their culture patrimony even if those works have been missing for decades and have traded hands multiple times, ” Said Zabel.
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