European Police Are Making Arrests in a String of High-Profile Old Master Forgeries of Cranach, El Greco, and Others

There has at last been an arrest in a high-profile string of
suspected Old Master
forgeries uncovered in 2016. An Italian painter, Lino Frongia, 61, was taken into custody in
northern Italy earlier this week, while an arrest warrant has been
issued for French art dealer and collector Giulano Ruffini,
who sold the works in question.

Because the authorities issued European Union arrest warrants,
neither man requires extradition.

The forgery ring may have involved as much as €200 million ($255
million) in sales of fake Old Masters. The first painting
identified in the case was a Lucas Cranach the
Elder Venus, seized by French
authorities during a 2016 exhibition of the collection of
the Prince of Liechtenstein at the Caumont Centre
d’Art in Aix. The prince had purchased the work from
Ruffini.

Suspicions quickly arose about other paintings sold by the
collector. Sotheby’s tapped scientist and art conservator
James Martin of the Massachusetts-based authentication
firm Orion Analytical to take a look at
a purported Frans Hals work, and a painting attributed
to Parmigianino. He found
both to be modern fakes, leading
Sotheby’s to refund the buyers. (The auction house then acquired Martin’s
company in order to better vet works moving forward.)

Investigations into the
forgeries have also pointed to David with the Head of
Goliath, supposedly by Orazio Gentileschi, as well as other
paintings not yet named publicly.

Frongia’s arrest is tied to a painting seized in April 2016
during the last day of an El Greco exhibition at the Ca ‘dei
Carraresi in Treviso. The artist reportedly denies accusations that
he forged the piece, titled San Francesco.

But this isn’t the first time that Frongia, a graduate of the
Fine Arts Academy of Bologna, has been linked to forgery claims. In
2008, Italian art historian and critic Vittorio Sgarbi, a friend of
the artist, claimed that he had seen a purported Correggio
painting, Volto di Christo, then on view in a Galleria
Nazionale di Parma exhibition, in Frongia’s studio. (But when the
purported El Greco was seized, it was Sgarbi who insisted “I can
guarantee its authenticity,” according to the Corriere del
Veneto.)

Ruffini, the dealer now being sought for arrest, sold that work
to the Correggio Foundation, according to Art Newspaper.
Frongia denied having
painting the work, although he copped to creating—but not
selling—other copies and Old Master lookalikes, including a
different Christ in the style of Correggio. (Sgarbi once called
Frongia the “greatest living Old Master” and commissioned him
to paint a Baroque-style Virgin Mary mural for a church near
Syracuse, Italy, after it was damaged by an earthquake and
reconstructed.)

Like Frongia, Ruffini has insisted on his innocence, claiming
that he is just a collector and that it was curators and experts
who judged the now-condemned paintings to be authentic Old Masters.
Works tied to the scandal were shown at major museums,
including London’s National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum in
New York. At one point, the Louvre started a national campaign to
raise €5 million ($7.25 million) to buy what turned out to be a
fake Hals.

News of these dramatic developments come as a London commercial
court prepares to issue a verdict over Sotheby’s $10 million
private sale of the so-called Hals to Seattle collector Richard
Hedreen. Days before the trial was set to
begin in April, Sotheby’s settled with
the work’s seller, London dealer Mark Weiss, to the tune of $4.2
million. The auction house moved forward with its case
against hedge-fund manager David Kowitz’s company Fairlight
Arts Venture, which co-owned the work and argued that Sotheby’s
decision to refund Hedreen was premature.

Previously, a New York court ruled in Sotheby’s
favor regarding the ersatz Parmigianino, ordering seller
Lionel de Saint Donat-Pourrieres to pay the company $1.2 million,
covering a full refund plus interest, attorney’s fees, and the cost
of having Orion authenticate the work.

The post European Police Are Making Arrests in a String of
High-Profile Old Master Forgeries of Cranach, El Greco, and
Others appeared first on artnet News.