Italian fans of Leonardo da Vinci will have to be patient.
A contentious 16th-century painting of a marquess once put on sale for a reported $123 million that may have been painted by Da Vinci won’t be headed back to Italy any time soon after Switzerland’s top court ruled its owner didn’t import it illegally.
The owner of “Portrait of Isabella d’Este,” traced to a private vault in the Swiss city of Lugano in 2015, shouldn’t be forced to return the canvas even though a lower tribunal in the Swiss canton of Ticino issued such a ruling in 2018, the Swiss Supreme Court said in its May 13 verdict released Wednesday. The top court, moreover, said rules agreed between Switzerland and Italy on the importation and return of cultural property didn’t apply to the painting.
“The illegal export of a cultural good” is banned “only if the object in question” is included in a “corresponding Italian inventory, which is not the case,” the court said.
As the value of historic paintings soar, they’ve become both sought-after assets for investors as well as pawns in international disputes, many involving Switzerland. “Salvator Mundi,” a painting also believed to be by Da Vinci has been at the heart of a dispute between a Geneva art dealer and Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who said he was ripped off when he bought the painting from the Swiss.
Gone missing?
Though Rybolovlev sold it at auction in November 2017 for $450.3 million, nearly triple what he paid for it, a scheduled showing of the canvas depicting Jesus Christ at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in September was canceled without explanation, prompting speculation that the work has gone missing. Ben Lewis, the author of “The Last Leonardo,’’ a book about the history of the painting, thinks it may be in Switzerland, at the Geneva Free Ports, the world’s largest tax-free storage facility for priceless art.
In the case of the Isabella d’Este, Italian prosecutors asked Swiss authorities to sequester the painting in Lugano, which they did. Then a court in the Adriatic seaside town of Pesaro in 2017 condemned the owner of the work to a jail sentence of 14 months for the unauthorized exportation of the painting, according to Wednesday’s statement. It’s not clear if the owner, whose name isn’t given, ever served the sentence.
A court in Ticino in March 2018 then ordered the painting be returned to Italy, which the owner appealed. The challenge was dismissed by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court in September, before his victory at the supreme court this month.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
