Art crime and forgery in Italy, from past to present

Posted by Museum Secrets on Dec 1, 2010 | No Comments

While working on a story about the Laocoon at the Vatican - part of the first episode in the Museum Secrets series premiering on History Television in January - I started to think about what was possibly one of the greatest art forgery cases in the world. It just so happened to take place in Italy , so I wanted to know how Italy is doing with art forgery now.

When you think of art forgery you might think of an example from a film like Incognito (1998), in which an artist forges Rembrandt paintings. However, in the real world, although we don’t often know about it, forgeries happen much more abundantly, even if they don’t often make news headlines. Today art crime (including art forgery,) is the third highest grossing criminal enterprise in the world today - behind only drugs and arms trafficking, so says the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) which makes it their mission to stop art crime.

Coincidentally, guess where ARCA is based? No city other than the one where the Laocoon sculpture rests - in Rome.

A few facts about art crime in Italy*:

Did you know?

There were a staggering 142,258 forged artworks recovered in Italy in 2001.
In Italy every year, somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 art thefts are reported.
There have been a total of 845,838 art thefts reported in Italy since 1969.
In most countries the number of art police employed is zero.

*Facts compiled by ARCA from sources including Interpol, the FBI, Scotland Yard, Carabinieri, independent research and ARCA projects.

ARCA’s research shows that art theft earns $2-6 billion internationally per year and that the revenue earned often funds international organized crime syndicates. So, just as art theft has become a huge global problem, in 2009 ARCA launched the first postgraduate program ever that is dedicated to the study of art crime.

To hear an interview with the Founding Director of ARCA, Noah Charney, in 2009 on CBC Radio’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi, you can listen here.

Stay plugged into the Museum Secrets blog, as we’ll have another story about art crime on Museum Secrets: Inside the Louvre, coming up later this week.