National Gallery: The trial of the 50-year-old oil painter begins for the “theft of the century”

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In 2012, he had stolen works by Picasso, Mondrian and Montcalvo from the National Gallery

The trial of the 50-year-old who had stolen works by Picasso, Mondrian and Montcalvo from the National Gallery in 2012 begins today.

The 50-year-old, an oil painter by profession, also known as an “art-freak”, has admitted his guilt since the moment of his arrest and is accused of a distinguished case of theft by complicity, committed and attempted, of things of artistic value that were in a collection exhibited in a public view of a public building over 120,000 euros at the expense of NPDD.

The 50-year-old had broken into the National Gallery and stolen “Female Head”, work number 1,357, Picasso’s reference to Dora Maar’s muse, the work “Mill” (1905), from the early period of the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, and a drawing of a religious early seventeenth century depiction, attributed to the Italian Guglielmo Caccia (Moncalvo).

The perpetrator was identified and arrested in June 2021 shortly before he left with the works for the Netherlands. After his arrest, he confessed and led the Police to the place where he had hidden two of the three works, in a stream of Keratea.

As he had testified, he moved them there, when information had begun to leak that the authorities were very close to locating the perpetrator. The third painting, attributed to Italian Guglielmo Caccia (Monclalvo) had claimed he threw it away because he thought it was damaged. The other two returned to the National Gallery.

The 50-year-old was remanded in custody and in the summer of 2022 he was released with electronic monitoring. “Everything that happened is because of his love for art. Every person in his life can make a mistake. I wanted to enrich my collection”, he had declared upon his release from prison.

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