According to a story which was first broke by Report and Fatto Quotidiano, the Carabinieri TPC have seized two additional suspect works of art, found to be in circulation via Italy's former undersecretary for culture, Vittorio Sgarbi. 

The altarpiece connected to Sgarbi was scheduled to be hung at the exhibition Il Cinquecento a Ferrara: Mazzolino, Ortolano, Garofalo, Dossa which has been curated by the art critic and is scheduled to run through 16 February 2025 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti.  

Following law enforcement investigations carried about by the Carabinieri TPC however, the altarpiece was removed from display, just three days before the start of the exhibition.  In the Ferrara exhibition dossier listed the artwork as being the property of the Collezione Cavallini Sgarbi.  Unfortunately it is suspected to be an artwork which was stolen in 1984 from a noble palace belonging to journalist Paganello Spetia in Bevagna. 

In addition to the suspect painting of Christ after his crucifixion, officers also executed a seizure for a terracotta sculpture, titled Madre e figlio, by Raffaele Consortini, an artist from Volterra, dating to 1939. 

Sgarbi had exhibited this object during an exhibition titled Giotto and the Twentieth Century which ran from 5 December 2022 to 4 June 2023 at the Mart in Rovereto, another public museum presided over by the art critic.  In this instance, the sculpture depicting a mother holding her infant child was indicated as being the property of the Fondazione Cavallini-Sgarbi.  

That said, the sculpture too seems to be tied to a theft.  It apparently matched a sculpture reported as stolen twenty-seven years ago, in 1997.  

The artwork was apparently taken from the burial chapel of the Nannipieri family, where it had been previously been placed at the family's tomb of the son of Antonio Nannipieri, a former judge of the Court of Appeal of Florence, who died, along with his girlfriend, in an accident in 1987.   

In Judge Nannipieri's own words when informed that his son's sculpture was in Sgarbi's collection: “Maybe he didn’t know it was stolen, but a collector should check the provenance of the things he buys, especially if he then puts them in an exhibition.” 

Leaving aside for a moment that an art historian is more than an average collector, and is fully trained in how to research the origins of works of art, this leads us to a second critical question, who Sgarbi got these works from in the first place.