The painting had been put up for sale by a Tuscan auction house. The investigations were carried out by the Carabinieri of the Nucleo for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Venice
BORCA DI CADORE. It had been stolen twenty years ago from a house in Borca di Cadore. The painting “Still life with a vase of flowers” was recovered by the Carabinieri of the Nucleo for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Venice, coordinated by the Public Prosecutor of the Court of Ragusa, as part of a broad investigation aimed at preventing and combating the trade in cultural goods of illicit origin.
The refined pictorial work is attributed to the Flemish school of the nineteenth century and is part of the ‘Ramini’ type: the representation, typical of the Dutch school, consists of a floral composition on a black background, painted with oil technique on copper support.
The painting appeared on the antiques market in February 2020 when it was about to be auctioned for sale by a Tuscan auction house. The soldiers of the Data Processing Section of the TPC Command, who daily monitor hundreds of works published in various sales catalogs, compared the images of the property with those contained in the “Database of illicitly stolen cultural assets”, the largest database of works of art. art stolen from the world, thus identifying the work.
The asset was stolen from a Paduan citizen from his home in Borca di Cadore in 2001. The investigations conducted by the TPC Unit of Venice led to the identification of the agent to sell, reconstructing the history of the painting: after the theft and receiving stolen goods, the work had been the subject of several changes of ownership, which involved various Italian regions, until it came into the hands of a person who tried to mask its provenance, declaring that he had purchased it from a person who died years earlier, with the intent to frustrate the investigation.
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