Slovenia Requests Return of Artwork Taken by Fascists
The Slovenian cabinet decided on Thursday to send a request to Italian authorities for the return of works of art that the Fascists took from churches and monasteries in Istria prior to the Second World War.
"We have included a list of the artwork," Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel told the press after the government session, adding that it was the same as the list that was published in an Italian document on the works of art from Koper, Izola and Piran.
Slovenia's request comes days after Italian authorities laid renewed claim on the artwork. An official document providing funding for a recent show of the artifacts in the Revoltella museum in Italy's Trieste claimed that the artworks were owned by Italy.
The Revoltella exhibition features 21 paintings and statuettes created between the 14th and 18th centuries. It includes works by Italian masters such as Paolo Veneziano, Alvise Vivarini, Alessandro Algardi, Giambattista Tiepolo, as well as Vittore and Benedetto Carpaccio.
They were taken from several churches on the coast, the Piran city hall and the Koper Regional Museum. After decades in the storage, the artefacts were restored only recently at the initiative of Vittorio Sgarbi, the former Culture Ministry state secretary.
The talks about returning the artefacts started soon after the Paris Peace Treaties following WWII. Rupel noted that an Italian-Yugoslav commission worked on the issue until the break-up of Yugoslavia. In 1992 the Slovenian Embassy in Rome and the Italian Foreign Ministry exchanged a diplomatic note to establish a commission.
The Slovenian government in 2002 appointed an inter-ministerial working group to examine the options for the return of the artwork; in March 2005 the commission was transformed into a working group to include representatives of the National Gallery and the Church, the latter as the formal owner of most of the artwork.
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