Tuesday, August 13, 2024, 11:26
The National Police, in collaboration with the French police, have arrested and charged with smuggling the man who wanted to illegally export a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. He was arrested after finding a ‘courier’ who was transporting the fake Leonardo with an expired export permit. The arrested man intended to sell it outside Spain and claimed that its price was 1.3 million euros, when its real value is less than 5,000.
The painting was travelling inside a vehicle when it was intercepted at the Modane border post in France. The expired export permit that accompanied it stated, according to the cataloguing carried out by the applicant and the data provided by him, that it had been made by Leonardo da Vinci, that its title was ‘Portrait of Giacomo Trivultio’, that its value would be 1.3 million euros and that its final destination was the Italian city of Milan.
From the Le Perthus border post the painting was taken to the Prado Museum, whose experts certified, after their analysis and technical study, that it was a fraud. They categorically ruled out the authorship of Leonardo or any of the Italian masters of his time.
The museum’s expert report confirmed that the work was “an imitation of Milanese portrait models from the late 15th and early 16th centuries” and that it had been made “with fraudulent intent, probably at the beginning of the 20th century.” Its real economic value was “between 3,000 and 5,000 euros.”
The agents had verified through the Ministry of Culture that the export permit that accompanied the painting was authentic but had expired several months ago, which made the departure of the fake Leonardo from Spain an illegal export.
The investigation that led to the arrest in Madrid of the man who was moving the piece as the alleged perpetrator of a crime of smuggling had begun in July 2022, when the agents learned, thanks to international police cooperation, that the French customs service had located a work that was being exported from Spain.
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