How the export of cultural property works (and what the simplification amendment might entail)

In the last few days, the Senate Committee on Industry, Trade and Tourism (and there would already be a lot to discuss here, but let’s move on) approved an amendment to ddl 2085, the draft of the “annual market and competition law.” The amendment concerns theexport of cultural goods. What culture has to do with the market and competition is quickly said: works of art, in essence, are considered the same as goods to be circulated within and outside the country’s borders.

That works of art are objects endowed with an inherent commercial nature is, of course, a well-known fact, but what distinguishes a work of art from a gas supply or a lawyer’s service (to name two other subjects the law deals with) is the cultural value of the work, which must be carefully assessed by a Superintendency. The above amendment, signed by five PD senators (Andrea Marcucci, Francesco Scalia, Camilla Fabbri, Linda Lanzillotta and Daniele Valentini) proposes to add an additional article to the law, containing some changes to be made to the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (also known as the “Urbani Code”), which, as many people know, is the reference text on cultural heritage legislation in Italy. Before seeing what the amendment provides, it is necessary to understand what the Code provides for private individuals who want to take a work of art out of the national borders.

The discipline is contained in the fifth chapter of the Code:"circulation in the international sphere." To summarize: a citizen who intends to permanently export a work of art (for example, to sell it to a foreign buyer) must submit a request to theexport office of his or her Superintendency, indicating the market value of the work. Within three days, the export office forwards the request to the relevant offices of the Ministry, which within ten days must ascertain the cultural value of the work and will gather all the information in their possession in order to enable the export office to decide whether or not to issue the authorization for the exit of the good (the so-called certificate of free circulation). At this point, the export office has forty days to give a response to the citizen. If the certificate is issued, the work can leave Italy. Otherwise, the process of declaration of cultural interest will be initiated. A similar path is required for citizens who wish to temporarily remove works in their possession (for example, in the case of loans for exhibitions and displays). Excluded from this rationale are works made by living artists, or whose execution dates back no more than 50 years.

Control over the circulation of cultural goods is obviously not meant to harm citizens, but rather to have the clearest possible picture of the works present in the national territory: through control it is possible to conduct more precisely the cataloguing of cultural goods present in Italy, it is possible to combatillegal exportation more effectively, and it is also possible to be able to better enhance the value of the works also in view of the organization of temporary exhibitions (if the works are catalogued, access will be easier). In addition, it is necessary to point out that denial of free circulation is a rather rare occurrence: in her speech at the conference preceding the Emergenza cultura event on May 6, art historian Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, a manager at the Ministry, reminded the audience that in 2014 there were only eighty-seven cases of denials, corresponding to 0.7 percent of exit applications.

Guercino, Study for Three Putti (18 x 22.8 cm; pen and brown ink and traces of chalk on paper). Passed at auction at Sotheby’s on July 3, 2013, and sold for the sum of £6,250

Well: in order to favor (or so it is thought) that 0.7 percent mentioned above, an amendment was passed that, according to some analysts, is likely to cause no small damage to Italy’s cultural heritage. The two main measures that the amendment intends to introduce are the extension to seventy years of the limit of fifty from the execution of the work and, above all, a threshold of 13,500 euros indicated as the minimum value of the works that should be subject to authorization: in other words, if the value of the work is less than 13,500 euros, the work will be able to leave Italy without the owner being required to apply for authorization. Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli herself recalled, again in the above speech, how the state makes several purchases of works that have a market value below the threshold contrived by the authors of the amendment. In fact, there are works by important artists that often go through auctions at far lower prices. In the last Sotheby ’s auction (to give just one example: we chose this house simply because it has the easiest site to navigate to see the results) works by artists such as Francesco Curradi, Mosè Bianchi, Giorgio Belloni, and Paul Ã?mile Chabas were awarded at figures that sometimes struggled to reach ten thousand euros. Not to mention drawings, whose quotations, which are far lower than those of paintings, allow a collector to acquire sheets by artists who have made art history at relatively low prices: the example of Giambattista Tiepolo has been given in these works (one of his Heads of St. Sylvester done in sanguine on paper was fetched ten thousand dollars at Sotheby’s in 2014), but the list could be enriched with the likes of Agostino Carracci, Simone Cantarini, Domenico Fiasella, Giulio Romano, Guercino, Mattia Preti, and many, many others.

It must be said that exit applications are almost always accepted, as mentioned above. So, there is a risk of passing a regulation that would have effects, not devastating but, in the opinion of many, not even pleasant, on the cultural heritage: in essence, according to the opponents, hundreds of works would risk leaving the control of the bodies in charge of protection. A control that, however, is certainly not intended to put a spoke in the wheels of citizens wishing to trade in art, but simply aims to precisely monitor the state of Italy’s heritage.

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