Florence, carabinieri find and return a work by Franco Angeli

Carabinieri from the Cultural Heritage Unit in Florence have recovered a painting belonging to Roman artist Franco Angeli (Rome, 1935 - 1988) and returned it to the art gallery in Castelfiorentino, in the province of Florence, from which it was stolen on Nov. 14, 2011.

Created in the first half of the 1970s and bearing the author’s signature at lower right, the work is a mixed media composition on paper and cardboard with colorful geometric figures depicting mountains with sun and blue sky. Catalogued at theFranco Angeli Archives in Rome, an entity charged with the protection of the artist’s image and name, it was first exhibited in 1975 in the same gallery where it was stolen a full 36 years later.

The investigation into its discovery was launched last February, following the comparison of images published in auction house catalogs with those contained in the database of illegally stolen cultural property managed by the TPC. Once the theft provenance was ascertained, the artwork was located at an auction house in northwestern Italy where it had meanwhile been offered for sale by an 81-year-old Roman professional, whom subsequent investigations led to exclude from any criminal liability since he had made the purchase from another Italian auction house.

Subsequent investigations, necessary to reconstruct the painting’s further transfers of ownership, led Carabinieri to identify a collector from Massa who died in 2017, whose heirs, unaware of the art asset’s illicit provenance, had entrusted its sale to a local lawyer.

This is not the only art asset stolen in that of Castelfiorentino with which the Carabinieri have had to deal recently: in January 2017, in fact, two other works by the same artist and in the same style had been recovered and returned, also from the same theft that saw ten paintings and drawings by various contemporary authors stolen, but of which only photographic images are available of three.

Florence, carabinieri find and return a work by Franco Angeli

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