Beautiful works of art captured from the mafia are on display at a new exhibition in Milan

Works by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg and other renowned artists were on display at the Royal Palace of Milan this month.

The pieces from this extensive collection have one thing in common: they were all seized by the Italian mafia.

“Works intended to remain buried in organized crime networks are ultimately returned to the community and take on a symbolic role of resistance against crime,” says Italian researcher Maria Rosaria Lagana. Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The exhibition, entitled “Save Arts: from seizures to public collections”, contains more than 80 paintings, prints and sculptures from the early 20th century to the early 2000s. Highlights include one of Warhol’s Summer arts in the parks lithographs and a Dalí interpretation by William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet. The collection also includes a oil painting of a square by the artist Giorgio de Chiricowho had a major influence on the surrealist movement.

“It is a rebirth for these works,” Lagana told AFP. “It’s a bit like, like archaeologists, you pull them out of the earth and put them on display for everyone to see.”

Lagana heads the Italian agency responsible for managing assets seized by police. Some of the recovered goods are sold at auctions, while others – including houses, apartments and farmland – are donated to public institutions and non-profit organizations.

Officials decided to show this art collection to the public because of the fame of the works.

“These are goods that could of course have been sold, but the decision was made to keep them in museums because they are of great value,” Lagana told AFP.

According to the news agency, more than twenty of the works on display were seized in 2016 from a member of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, based in the southern Italian region of Calabria. Another 60 came from a 2013 seizure ordered by a court in Rome.

Visitors to the exhibition will also have the opportunity to learn more about how authorities recovered these works. In addition to the impressive art collection, the Royal Palace of Milan displays newspaper clippings and videos of police confiscating the works.

Admission to the exhibition is free. After it concludes in Milan on January 26, it will open on the Palace of Culture in Calabria from February 8 to April 27. The artworks are then distributed to museums across the country, per Euro newsKieran Guilbert.

In 2016, police seized two paintings by Vincent van Gogh from a building near Naples ART news‘, reports George Nelson. They had been stolen by the mafia from a museum in Amsterdam more than ten years earlier and each had an estimated value of up to $55 million.

This exhibition is not the first to show a collection of stolen art. In 2022, the Museum of Rescued Art opened in Rome to exhibit artifacts stolen from across Italy and smuggled into the United States. The museum is currently closed due to nearby urban redevelopment projects.

“Save Arts: from seizures to public collections‘ can be seen at the Royal Palace of Milan until January 26, 2025.