Stunning Artworks Seized From the Mafia Go On Display at a New Exhibition in Milan

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

The pieces in this wide-ranging collection have one thing in common: They were all confiscated from the Italian mafia.

“Works destined to remain buried in the networks of organized crime are finally returned to the community, taking on a symbolic role as resistance to crime,” Italian investigator Maria Rosaria Lagana tells Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The exhibition, titled “Save Arts: From Confiscations to Public Collections,” features 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 of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The collection also features an oil painting of a piazza by the artist Giorgio de Chirico, who was a major influence on the Surrealist movement.

“It’s a rebirth for these works,” Lagana tells AFP. “It is a bit like digging them out of the earth, like archaeologists, and putting them on display where everyone can see them.”

Lagana heads the Italian agency in charge of administering the assets seized by law enforcement. Some of the recovered goods are sold in auctions, while others—including houses, apartments and agricultural land—are donated to public institutions and nonprofit organizations.

Officials decided to place this collection of art on public display due to the prominence of the works.

“These are goods that obviously could have been sold, but it was decided to keep them in museums, because they are of significant value,” Lagana tells AFP.

According to the news agency, more than 20 of the works on display were confiscated in 2016 from a member of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, which is 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 get the chance to learn more about how authorities recovered these works. Alongside the impressive collection of art, the Royal Palace of Milan is displaying press clippings and videos of police seizing the works.

Admission to the exhibition is free. After wrapping up in Milan on January 26, it will open at the Palace of Culture in Calabria from February 8 to April 27. The artworks will then be distributed to museums across the country, per Euronews’ Kieran Guilbert.

In 2016, law enforcement seized two Vincent van Gogh paintings from a property near Naples, as ARTnews’ George Nelson reports. They had been stolen by the mafia more than a decade earlier from a museum in Amsterdam, and they each had an estimated value of up to $55 million.

This exhibition isn’t the first to display a collection of stolen art. In 2022, the Museum for Rescued Art opened in Rome to display artifacts that were stolen from across Italy and smuggled into the United States. The museum is currently closed due to nearby urban redevelopment projects.

“Save Arts: From Confiscations to Public Collections” is on view at the Royal Palace of Milan through January 26, 2025.

Ella Feldman | READ MORE

Ella Malena Feldman is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She examines art, culture and gender in her work, which has appeared in Washington City Paper, DCist and the Austin American-Statesman.