On Castelvecchio paintings: the government may not care about art

I read with ever-growing dismay and disgust the news around the return of paintings belonging to the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, stolen in November last year, found in Ukraine, and for months still waiting to return to Italy. Bewilderment and disgust because the paintings have spent more time in the hands of Ukrainian institutions than in those of the thieves. Dismay and disgust because of the silences and inability of the Italian institutions to deal with an affair that has taken on farcical tones and would even make one laugh, were it not for the fact that some of the most important paintings of our artistic heritage are involved. Bewilderment and disgust because even today, almost exactly seven months after the discovery, we still do not have precise indications as to when the Castelvecchio works will be able to return to their home.

Yesterday the Ukrainian ambassador to Italy, Yevhen Perelygin, at a meeting in Verona, let it be known that the works will return to Italy “by the end of December.” But we have good reason to welcome the ambassador’s communication with reservation, since all the announcements so far have not then produced the hoped-for effects. At first it seemed that the paintings were to return to Verona by July. In July, however, the undersecretary of foreign affairs informed that an official meeting was being prepared between Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and that the works would return by autumn. To be precise, they would be back in November, Renzi himself reassured. Indeed, the intention was (and still is) to present the return as part of an official ceremony with a meeting between Renzi and Poroshenko. The problem, it seems, is that there is a great struggle to find a date that can make Renzi’s and Poroshenko’s commitments fit together. What’s more, the referendum is also involved: impossible, the newspapers tell us, for Renzi to find time to think about meeting with Poroshenko and returning the paintings, caught up as he is in this vacuous, boring, self-referential and irritating referendum campaign that has been monopolizing the information and, so it would seem, the commitments of institutional figures for weeks.

Some of the works stolen from the Castelvecchio Museum. Full list with pictures at this link

And let us not mention the evanescent figure of Dario Franceschini, minister of cultural heritage (one of the worst in history) who has never made a serious commitment to return the paintings to Italy. On the contrary, in the days following the theft he had not uttered a single word, and was therefore harshly criticized. But Franceschini does not seem to have been shaken at all by the criticism: on the contrary, his conduct is still devoted to absence (an absence that weighs heavily, given that it is supposed to be the turn of the minister in charge to deal personally with a matter involving stolen works), and to total disinterest, except for a few timid and sporadic declarations of ritual, such as the usual matter-of-fact thanks to the authorities following the discovery. And we wonder what on earth should occupy the first place on the agenda of a minister of cultural heritage, if not the return of as many as seventeen paintings stolen from one of Italy’s most important museums: we speak of works by Pisanello, Mantegna, Tintoretto. And what about the mayor of Verona, Flavio Tosi, who even grotesquely granted honorary citizenship to Poroshenko? The management of the whole affair by Italian institutions has been, to say the least, inconsistent and clumsy, with the consequence that Italy’s image has suffered, since our institutions appeared, from the very beginning, at the mercy of events, confused, without a pulse, unable to take incisive diplomatic action to speed up the restitution process. And to think that back in July the affair was called an"international mess": then only two months had passed since the discovery, so now that seven months have passed, what term should we adopt to define this most shameful situation? A historical debacle? A colossal delirium? A clear essay of utter diplomatic incompetence? A manifest statement of blatant disinterest in art?

The fact is that it took citizens to keep the attention high. In Verona, of course, the issue is very keenly felt, and it must be said that the love that the people of Verona have for their works is something exemplary. There has been an appeal signed by a thousand people and sent to the minister of cultural heritage and the Italian ambassador to Ukraine. There was a lawyer from Verona who filed a complaint against Poroshenko for embezzlement and receiving stolen goods (a complaint that was little more than symbolic but still had the merit of making people discuss the matter). There are those in the media and on social media who have gone to great lengths to report and devote space to the incident in order not to let their guard down and to continue to press for a speedy resolution.

But beyond all that, we have reasons to fear that the end-of-December deadline again set in these hours is nothing more than yet another announcement to be taken with a grain of salt: if it is true that the return of the works has been subordinated (quite improperly, in my opinion) to Matteo Renzi’s agenda and to a future meeting that now cannot but appear, in regard to us citizens, hypocritical and mocking, there is the risk of waiting much longer, since the prime minister would not seem to have included the Castelvecchio works among his priorities. No wonder, when we consider that the Renzi government, with its reform of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, will be remembered, in the history of the sector, as the one that dealt the hardest blows to the protection, preservation and even enhancement of heritage. And the fact that, to this government, its prime minister and the minister of cultural heritage, art does not care that much, is but a glaring symbol of the debacle toward which the cultural heritage sector now seems to be heading.

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