Bernini is renowned as a master of Baroque architecture, and the disappearance of the 18-page manuscript spurred an elaborate sting operation. The suspect allegedly met with Mauro Gambetti, head of administration at St. Peter’s Basilica, on May 27 under the belief that Gambetti was interested in buying the gilded document, which contains details of ornate features Bernini created to decorate the famous canopy rising above the basilica.

Gambetti, however, had secretly partnered with Vatican investigators to ensnare the suspect, who was reportedly accompanied by an unidentified accomplice. After handing the seller a €120,000 ($129,000) check in exchange for the manuscript, Vatican gendarmes arrived and arrested him.

The seller has been identified in Italian media reports as the art historian Alfio Maria Daniele Pergolizzi, who is believed to have stolen the manuscript from the archives of the Fabric of St. Peter’s, an institution established in the 16th century to manage the construction of the basilica and that now oversees restoration of the structure. Pergolizzi served as head of the communications department between 1995 and 2011. Per Reuters, he is being detained in a Vatican prison on charges of attempted extortion. 

Vatican News, the state’s official media channel, reported that Alessandro Diddi, promoter of justice for the Church, will decide this week whether to indict Pergolizzi.

THE HEADLINES

UNDER REVIEW. The Academy of Museum Motion Pictures in Los Angeles announced Monday that it will revise an exhibit on Hollywood Jewish History following backlash, as first reported in the New York Times. The exhibition, titled “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” opened on May 19, and was swiftly met with criticism from a group Jewish activists for its portrayal of Jewish studio founders, which some described as antisemitic. An open letter from United Jewish Writers, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter on Monday, protested the use of the words “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer” and “predator” in the show’s wall text. Some cultural critics pushed back against these detractors, noting that those descriptions were apt when applied to certain Hollywood figures who had mixed legacies. For its part, the museum has said in a statement that it “will be implementing the first set of changes immediately — they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes.” 

GRAZE AND GAZE. The world’s largest art fair, Art Basel, is upon us, and the guides to must-see shows, guesses to what wares will be offered, and artist spotlights are rolling in. ARTnews’s Devorah Lauter journeyed to the bucolic outskirts of the Swiss city for a feature on the Basel Social Club, which she describes as an “art fair–cum–social gathering” set on 50 acres of farmland in Bruderholz, where cows graze between installations by Tomás Saraceno and David Medalla, among others. The Art Newspaper, meanwhile, took the party indoors, as its reporter attended the swanky dinner for the imminent art crowd at a one-off eatery at an old water reservoir in the heart of Basel. The menu included mussels served with tarragon and ginger, apparently.

THE DIGEST

A former Vatican employee has been arrested for trying to sell a manuscript by Gian Lorenzo Bernini that he allegedly stole from an official archive of the Holy See. The suspect was busted as part of a major sting operation. [The Art Newspaper]

Hundreds of protestors staged a die-in on the streets outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to protest the mass casualties in Gaza. Between the bodies, a monumental Palestinian flag was unfurled. [Al Jazeera]

In his sterling review of the exhibition “I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker,” at the Norton Simon Museum, Christopher Knight likens the show to a balm for the “criminality, outrageous racism, gaslighting, antediluvian misogyny, pedestrian hatreds, cruel religiosities, [and] fascist violence” prevalent in American politics in recent years. This is the museum’s first presentation of all four of Goya’s main print series; it sounds like a must-see. [Los Angeles Times]

A new museum dedicated to TV sci-fi memorabilia is set for Santa Monica. Aptly called Sci-Fi World, the institution was conceived by the nonprofit called the New Starship Foundation, and boasts the support of Star Trek alumni William Shatner and George Takei. [Deadline] 

Archaeologists have unearthed around 19,000 artifacts dating to the Middle Stone Age, at a “once-in-a-decade” excavation site in the United Kingdom. [Newsweek]

The American Institute of Architects is under scrutiny after 22 past presidents of the AIA signed letters containing claims of misconduct against the organization’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Lakisha Ann Woods. The letters accuse current leaders of “potential misspending, nepotism, cronyism, and the pursuit of personal gain.” [Bloomberg]

Oxford University will return a 500-year-old bronze sculpture of a Hindu poet and saint to India, the university’s Ashmolean Museum said. [AP News]

AY CARAMBA. The British Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even the Louvre—each institution has been the target of a headline-dominating art heist, but are authorities overlooking an active thieving ring operating in plain sight, albeit in a humbler venue? Taco Bell—yes, the fast-food chain—has an art collection, and it’s been disappearing since at least 2015. In one incident at a Taco Bell in Westlake, Ohio, a thief pulled an acrylic painting, created by artist Mark T. Smith on commission and worth $800, right off the wall and walked out, to the shock of staff. (Though that location admittedly has bad luck: “It’s caught fire, they had somebody crash into it and it caught fire. That place is kind of jinxed,” Westlake police captain Guy Turner told Artnet.) The stolen paintings have been spotted for sale on online marketplaces, where a bundle of two or three could bring in thousands of dollars. When will the madness end? Justice for Taco Bell, we say. 

Basso’s death has also raised questions about the Euphronios Krater, a 2,500-year-old vase Etruscan vase that was once the property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was later repatriated to Italy in 2008. The Monsignor had a copy of the krater in his collection that, according to Il Messaggero, may give the Met an opportunity to demand the vase be returned. 

The Met purchased the vase in 1972 from the antiquities dealer Robert E. Hecht for $1.3 million. Shortly the acquisition, the Italian government, suspecting that the vase had been looted from the Greppe Sant’Angelo area in December 1971 by “a gang of tomb robbers,” angled for it to come back, according to the New York Times.

However, the copy in Basso’s collection has been dated to the 19th century, which suggests the vase may have been excavated before 1909, the year Italy banned the export important cultural items. Some have even speculated that the vase in Basso’s collection could be the original krater. The Met did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they plan to request the vase be returned.

Regardless of whether the museum will jockey for ownership of the vase, how Basso came to gather such an impressive collection of art is still in question, especially given the investigation into the supposed attempt to sell forgeries, of which he was cleared.

“He was not a rich industrialist, a prince or count. He was a man of extremely humble origins whose mother worked as a caretaker,” Franca Giansoldati, a journalist for Il Messaggero, told the Art Newspaper. Giansoldati added that during a 2021 interview, Basso claimed to have been given the works by “generous people.” According to an interview published in Corriere della Sera, Basso’s lawyer, Lorenzo Contrada, claimed the Monsignor had been “offered as gifts by other prelates who had received them in turn from worshippers without heirs.”

The fraud investigation was closed, and Basso was not charged with any crimes. In 2020, he donated his entire collection, which is said to comprise of around 70 pieces ranging from paintings to sculpture to antiquities, to the organization responsible for restoring St. Peter’s Basilica, the Fabbrica di San Pietro. 

In 2021, when asked by an Il Messaggero journalist how he came to gather such an impressive collection, Basso reportedly said, “It’s like having a lot of shoes in your closet. Some of them were bought, others were gifts.”

According to Ill Messaggero, Pope Frances ordered an investigation into the management of Fabbrica di San Pietro two years ago, but it is unclear whether Basso’s donations would fall into the investigation’s purview.

In the announcement, the Vatican described the move as a “donation” from Francis to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian Archbishop of Athens and all of Greece, and said it was “a concrete sign of his sincere desire to follow in the ecumenical path of truth.”

The “donation” marks one of the highest-profile returns of the 2,500-year-old sculptures to their country of origin since the calls for their reunification gained global traction. The British Museum, which owns one of the largest collections of Parthenon Marbles, rebuked decades of appeals from Greece for their return, but has recently signaled a softening of its stance. 

The Parthenon Sculptures are the remnants of a group of marble relief panels and pedimental sculptures from the outer walls of the temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens. Around half of the surviving sculptural decoration was from the Acropolis in 1810 by the Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin, during the Ottoman occupation of Greece. They have been the centerpiece of the British Museum’s galleries that house artifacts from Egypt and ancient Mediterranean civilizations since 1816. 

Earlier this month it was revealed that George Osborne, the chair of the British Museum, and Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister, had met in London to discuss a possible loan of the marbles to Greece. Following the news Mitsotakis said a “win-win solution can be found,” while the British Museum said though it was pursuing a “new Parthenon partnership with Greece”, they were “not going to dismantle our great collection as it tells a unique story of our common humanity”.

Other fragments of the original frieze are scattered in museums across Europe but have slowly been making their way back to Greece. In May, Italy announced that a fragment belonging to the Parthenon’s eastern frieze on loan from a Sicilian museum would stay in Athens. The artifact, depicting the foot of the goddess Artemis peeking out from a tunic, was returned as part of a four-year loan agreement between Greece and the Antonio Salinas Archaeological Museum in Palermo. In return for the fragment, the Acropolis Museum loaned Italy a 5th-century B.C.E. statue of the goddess Athena and an 8th-century B.C.E. amphora.

The Vatican’s collection includes a head of a horse, a head of a young man, and a bearded older male head. The head of the young man was previously loaned to Greece for a year in 2008.

Greece’s Culture Ministry praised the pope’s decision, which had followed a request by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians worldwide. Their return aids Greece’s efforts for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures in London “with those on display in the Acropolis Museum,” the Culture Ministry said in a statement. 

The Vatican stressed in its statement that this was a donation to the Greek Orthodox Church, not a reparation to Greece, avoiding a precedent in which other colonized countries could issue formal requests for the return of their artifacts.

At approximately 10:30 am, two protestors — a 26-year-old woman referred to only as Laura and an unnamed older man — along with several reporters, entered the Vatican Museums where the activists glued themselves to the base of the sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons. Shortly after entering, that section of the museum was evacuated and the two activists stripped of their phones, which the release cited as concerning because video documentation is often used to ensure protests proceed without undue abuses.

“Laura,” according to the release,  recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Art History and said that she was prompted to protest because she felt her future, both personally and professionally, had been robbed by government officials who have continued to ignore the climate crisis. She explained that the statue she and the other activist chose spoke to this reality.

The sculpture, Laocoön and His Sons, depicts Laocoön, a key figure in the myth of the war of Troy. A Trojan priest, Laocoön advised his fellow Trojans to set fire to the Trojan horse that had been sent from the Greeks as a gift which, in reality, hid a band of enemy soldiers. In the myth, Athena punishes him for his continued efforts to undermine the Greeks’ plans and sends a serpent to strangle him and his two sons.

“The alarm signal went unheard, the ambassador of danger and his children died crushed in the silence of unconsciousness and the entire city of Troy was set on fire, causing the death of many naive but innocent people,” Laura said in the release.

“As witnesses of a crisis ignored for decades, we have chosen to draw attention to our message by drawing close to the figure of Laocoon, the seer who suffered extreme repression for having tried to warn his fellow citizens of an impending catastrophe,” said an unnamed Ultima Generazione activist in the release. “There will be no open museums, no art, no beauty in a world plagued by the climate and ecological emergency. Drought, floods, fires, pollution and scarcity of resources will take over if radical choices are not made in this regard.”

The statue is one of the Vatican’s most valuable artworks. It was discovered in 1506 and identified to be the masterpiece referred to by Pliny the Elder in his writings. After its discovery, it was bought by Pope Julius II and made the centerpiece of the Vatican’s sculpture garden. It was thought to have been made around 40-30 B.C.E.

The Observer reported earlier in August that both Just Stop Oil and Ultima Generazione have received $1 million in funding from the California-based Climate Emergency Fund. The money is used exclusively to provide legal aid to activists from these organizations, CEF executive director Margaret Klein Salamon told the publication.

The project is a collaboration between Sensorium, a VR company, and Humanity 2.0, a Vatican-led nonprofit that is working toward “human flourishing,” according to its website.

Humanity 2.0 is chaired by Father Philip Larrey, a unique presence in the Holy See. Father Larrey is the Chair of Logic and Epistemology at the Pontifical Lateran University in the Vatican, the Dean of the philosophy department, and the author of a couple books on the effect of technology on modern society and the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.

“We look forward to working with Sensorium to explore ways to democratize art, making it more widely available to people around the world regardless of their socio-economic and geographical limitations,” Father Larrey said in a statement. “The partnership with Sensorium brings this goal a step further and equips us with the latest tech solutions.”

It is expected that the gallery, which will be viewable through VR and on desktops, will be available sometime this year.

The Vatican is a repository of some of the finest art and objects in the world. The Vatican’s museum was founded in the 16th century and holds some 800 artworks, including works by artists of the Renaissance, such as Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as more modern works by the likes of Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh.

The Vatican’s press representative claimed that the NFTs won’t be used to sell products or objects, though it is unclear what they will be used for. “The nature of this project for Humanity 2.0. is exclusively social and not commercial. Also, here NFTs don’t necessary have to come in a from of artworks, but can also include tickets and other objects,” the representative said.

Update 5/4/22 12:08 PM: The article was updated to include a quote from the Vatican’s press representative. 

The work in question features Jesus Christ with his arms raised and a heart on his chest that bears the words “Just Use It.” It is part of a series of similar images that Babrow has been creating since 2013, and the artist said that she glued this particular work to a bridge near the Vatican in 2019.

“The real shock was that you don’t expect certain things from certain organizations,” Babrow told AP of the Vatican’s stamps.

Mauro Lanfranconi, an attorney representing Babrow in the suit, told the AP that the Vatican, by putting Babrow’s work on a stamp to essentially promote the Catholic Church, had “irrevocably distorted” the the artist’s initial purpose and vision for the work, which she described as an effort to “promote the intelligence and the brain of the heart.”

The Vatican’s stamp office and its press office both declined to comment on the lawsuit to the AP.

After the Vatican printed 80,000 stamps with Babrow’s image and offered them for sale at its post office for €1.15 each, Babrow’s lawyers said they attempted to contact the institution’s philatelic and numismatic office. The Vatican, the attorneys said, did not respond to their letter or email.

The possibility of Babrow’s lawsuit succeeding, however, might be complicated by a recent decision in a case regarding another work of street art by Banksy. Earlier this month, the European Union Intellectual Property Office ruled against the artist’s efforts to trademark his famed image of a monkey wearing a sandwich board that reads, “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.” The EUIPO’s ruling specifically cited the work’s display in public spaces, allowing it to be freely “photographed by the general public and has been disseminated widely.”

Eric Edwards in a screenshot from Mark Zemel’s documentary short, The Collector.

Brooklynite Eric Edwards, owner of the largest private collection of African artifacts (2,500 works dating back 4,000 years), is going to build his own African art museum. [NBC]

A project to restore 14 historic mausoleums destroyed in Timbuktu three years ago by terrorists will be completed by the end of July. [The Art Newspaper]

Nicolas Bourriaud, director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was fired last Wednesday by French minister of culture Fleur Pellerin “after a 45-minute exchange about the direction of the school.” [Artforum]

Studio Museum in Harlem has announced plans to move to a new $122 million building, which will be designed by the British architect David Adjaye and located on West 125th Street. [The New York Times]

Travel company Quikky is offering a tour of the Vatican’s secret gay art history. [The Huffington Post]

Camilla Wills’s “Licence Licence” at Gaudel de Stampa in Paris. [Contemporary Art Daily]

China has relaxed its ban on Ai Weiwei’s art. [The Art Newspaper]

International researchers have curated some of the world’s most significant examples of art (including visual art, poetry, music, drama and dance), and uploaded the corresponding date onto small disks. These disks will be sent to the moon on a rover next year. [The Economic Times]