That Caravaggio went out illegally, the Met returns it to Italy: the case in Parliament

A famous work by Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi; Milan, 1571 - Porto Ercole, 1610), the Negation of St. Peter, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, should be returned to Italy, according to Senator Margherita Corrado, since it was allegedly exported illegally in the 1960s and therefore should not be in the United States: the case of the Met work was brought to the attention of Parliament by the 5-Star Movement senator with a parliamentary question co-signed by her colleagues, all Pentastellists, Danila De Lucia, Luisa Angrisani, Elio Lannutti and Nicola Morra.

The painting is supposed to date back to the artist’slast Neapolitan period: there are no documents contemporary with Caravaggio that tie the Negation of St. Peter to the artist with absolute certainty, but it is nonetheless known that the work, in 1613, was given to Guido Reni by an Urbino engraver, Luca Ciamberlano, a collaborator of the Bolognese painter (the news comes from a receipt dated May 3 of that year), against whom Guido Reni had claims. The work then passed to Cardinal Paolo Savelli and is attested in his palace in Ariccia, and then again in the family’s holdings in Rome, at Palazzo di Monte Savello. The last attestation in the Savelli family collections was in September 1650, when an inventory mentions an “Ancella con S. Pietro negante, et una altra meza figura per traverso, p.mi 5, et 4 del Caravaggio, D. 250.” The painting is said to have remained in the collections of the Savelli family and their heirs until the 20th century, only to be purchased, at an unspecified date but in any case between 1945 and 1952, on the Neapolitan market by collector Vincenzo Imparato Caracciolo.

At this point the Met’s official reconstruction and Senator Corrado’s begin to diverge. According to the Met, Caracciolo’s daughter, Princess Elena Imparato Caracciolo, allegedly sold the work in 1970 to a restorer in Lausanne, one Ian Dik, who in turn sold the painting to New York dealer Julius Weitzner, who, in 1976, sold the painting to collector Herman Shickman. Finally, in 1997, the Metropolitan acquired the Negation of St. Peter from Shickman. Corrado writes that in 1964 the painting was in Naples “where it was recognized by the restorer Pico Cellini in the wake of Roberto Longhi’s hypothesis,” and following the restoration (dating from 1959-1964), “towards the end of the decade,” Corrado writes, “the canvas was sold to Swiss aristocrats and left the country to eventually land in the collection of Herman Shickman, whose wife Lila Acheson Wallace sold it to the MET in 1997, so much so that it appears inventoried under no. 1997.167”.

Margherita Corrado points out that “the art historian Maurizio Marini, author of a successful monograph on Caravaggio, as early as 1973 reconstructed in detail and unveiled the criticalities of the path mentioned: from Italy, the painting would first pass into a collection in Lausanne, leaving the country without an export permit, then, with the mediation of restorer Ian Dik, it would reach New York antiquarian Julius Waitzner; the Shickman, other sources add, bought it in 1981 and then exhibited it in London in 1982, Washington in 1983 and New York in 1985, until the alleged sale disguised as a donation by Lila Shickman to the Metropolitan’s management, which could hardly have been unaware of the vicissitudes described.” Corrado writes that the “hypocrisy” reached its peak on the occasion of the great and memorable exhibition on Caravaggio held in Naples and New York in 1985(Caravaggio and his time): in the Italian version of the catalog, art historian Mina Gregori wrote that the work “After 1964 it left Italy illegally,” a concept “sweetened” in the English translation where it reads “It left Italy after 1964.” Several other subsequent publications echo Marini’s thesis and point to the work as illegally exported.

The case of the Negation of St. Peter has also been discussed at length in the past. In 2015, art historian Vittorio Sgarbi intervened several times on the matter, providing the reconstruction of the affair that Margherita Corrado later brought to parliament. “The tracing of the painting’s path,” Sgarbi wrote in an article in Corriere della Sera on August 21, 2015, “my direct knowledge of the heirs, with whom I have often spoken, the publications and even the articles in the newspapers, which describe the vicissitudes of the painting and irrefutably indicate its illegal exit from Italy, should be enough to trigger any investigator and any carabinieri unit, especially in view of the exceptional importance of the painting, a masterpiece of the maturity of the painter, with a powerful and eloquent chiaroscuro: a work whose value today is no less than $150 million.” Sgarbi also singled out a specific person responsible, namely the Metropolitan’s curator of European painting, art historian Keith Christiansen: “the figure directly responsible for the affair,” Sgarbi wrote, "is Keith Christiansen, the director of the Metropolitan [he never actually held this position, ed.], who knew perfectly well the history of the painting and its abusive provenance. Among other things minutely recounted by Maurizio Marini, before in the monograph on Caravaggio, in the magazine Napoli Nobilissima, in 1973, publishing the painting." For Maurizio Marini, the work had been illegally exported from Italy around 1966.

On Christiansen’s responsibility, Margherita Corrado also agrees, who writes: “just as much ambiguity surrounds the donation to the Metropolitan, which is evidently fictitious, and the Museum now seems so certain that it has ’gotten away with it’ that in its (2018) condolence press release on Lila’s death it admits that the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Shickman allowed ’to acquire’ Caravaggio’s ’Denial of Peter,’ while in that for Herman’s death (2007) it had avoided direct references. Only the historical [sic] head of the European painters department, Keith Christiansen, at the MET since 1977 and a key player in the change of hands, had recalled, in a personal message to his widow associated with the official one, the interlocutions he had had and the deceased’s firm wish that the work ’find a home’ at the MET.” And in 2019 Sgarbi, in an article in Il Giornale, also brought up Roberto Longhi: the painting, the art historian recalls, “It was spotted and recognized by restorer Pico Cellini in the collection of Princess Elena Imprato Caracciolo in Naples, where Roberto Longhi had of course seen it, attributing it, admittedly maliciously, to Battistello Caracciolo, in order to facilitate its sale to people he trusted.”

Margherita Corrado ultimately appealed to Minister of Cultural Heritage Dario Franceschini to take action to return the work to Italy, demanding to know “what initiatives he has intended to take so far and what he will take in the future to claim the return to Italy of the above-mentioned Caravaggio painting, which it is undisputed to have left the country without its export having been authorized and without the Metropolitan’s management, which has held it since 1997, being able to claim the excuse of acquiring it in good faith, since it acquired it well aware of its recent history, resorting to a fictitious donation for the purpose of apparently mitigating its responsibilities, a full 14 years after the United States ratified the 1970 Paris UNESCO Convention.”

Image: Caravaggio, Denial of St. Peter (1610; oil on canvas, 94 x 125.4 cm; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art)

That Caravaggio went out illegally, the Met returns it to Italy: the case in Parliament

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