Outstanding Carabinieri recovery: found 134 works by Silvano Campeggi stolen in 2019

An exceptional recovery by the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale Command in Florence: in fact, the military managed to recover 134 works that had been stolen in 2019 from the home of Florentine artist Silvano Campeggi (Florence, 1923 - 2018), known as “the Dwarf.” The works were returned this morning to Mrs. Elena Renzoni, the artist’s widow, at the Magliabechiana Library of the Uffizi Galleries by Major Lanfranco Disibio, commander of the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit in Florence.

The recovery was possible because the works of the great poster artist had been inventoried: among the stolen works (144 sketches made between 1945 and 1972) were some well-known international movie posters, which had been partly exhibited in Pisa, at Palazzo Blu, and in Florence, at Palazzo Vecchio, in 2017, as part of two exhibitions. The theft had only been reported on July 21, 2020, and the investigation was concluded in just ten days, thanks to the numerous pieces of information that the carabinieri received from the people who had been cataloguing the works and who had reported that some of the stolen sketches (eleven, to be precise) were for sale on a well-known website. The carabinieri therefore carried out verifications on the seller’s nickname, realizing that two other individuals, from the province of Lucca (and who in 2019 had had access to Campeggi’s home, for several times and in various capacities), had put the sketches up for sale. The loot had an estimated value of 500,000 euros.

Nano Campeggi, born in Florence, had attended art school and was a student of Ottone Rosai and Ardengo Soffici. He moved to Rome in the postwar period and was attracted by movie posters: thus, from 1945 to 1972, he worked for major American film companies, signing posters for more than three thousand films, including Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Modern Times, Casablanca. Between the 1950s and 1960s, Campeggi, known as the artist of the stars, created thousands of portraits: famous were those of Humphrey Bogart, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, John Wayne, Paul Newman, Anita Heckberg, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Rita Hayworth, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. Beginning in the 1960s, when the ancient art of film painters went into crisis due to the rapid technological and cultural changes around film promotion, Nano abandoned film posters, devoting himself to illustration, portraiture and especially painting. Returning to Florence in the 1970s, he created eight large paintings of battles from the Risorgimento and the portrait of Salvo d’Acquisto, a hero of the Resistance, for the Carabinieri Corps, which was used as a commemorative postage stamp by the Italian Postal Service in 1975.

Below are images of some of the recovered sketches.

Outstanding Carabinieri recovery: found 134 works by Silvano Campeggi stolen in 2019

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