Splendid Christmas gift for Lucca: returned 17th-century altarpiece stolen 43 years ago

A beautiful Christmas gift for Lucca: an important 17th-century altarpiece, the Madonna and Child with Saints Crispino and Crispinianus, by Giovanni Domenico Ferrucci (Fiesole, 1619 - Lucca, after 1669), stolen in 1977, has been returned to the archbishop of the Tuscan city by the Carabinieri’s Cultural Heritage Protection Unit. The work, dating from the early 1660s for the confraternity of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, was located in the church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius, and had been sold at a Milan auction house. Investigations made it possible to ascertain that the sale concerned precisely the stolen painting: decisive in this regard were the searches of the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio of the provinces of Lucca and Massa-Carrara, which made available the catalog of the property, where the work was accurately catalogued, complete with an image (the cataloguing dates back to 1976).

The disappearance of the painting (an oil on canvas measuring 202 x 154 cm) was only reported in the 1990s, when a survey of the churches of Lucca was carried out on the occasion of an exhibition entitled Painting in Lucca in the Early Seventeenth Century, held in 1994-1995. The work had then been put up for sale as the work of an unknown seventeenth-century artist, and was seized by the Bologna Nucleus on December 20, 2012: after the seizure, the work was also displayed at the Quirinale in 2014 as part of an exhibition on stolen goods later recovered by the Carabinieri(La memoria ritrovata. Treasures recovered by the Carabinieri, held from January 23 to March 16). Now, finally, the painting can return to its church: the work was unveiled yesterday at the Archbishop’s Hall in Lucca in the presence of the commander of the Carabinieri TPC Unit of Bologna, Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe De Gori, the archbishop of Lucca, Monsignor Paolo Giulietti, the provincial commander of the Carabinieri of Lucca, Colonel Ugo Blasi, and the superintendence official Neva Chiarenza.

Splendid Christmas gift for Lucca: returned 17th-century altarpiece stolen 43 years ago

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