During the night between Wednesday and Thursday, 49 works of art were stolen from the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the complex of buildings built between 1921 and 1938 by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in Gardone Riviera, in the province of Brescia. They were jewels and sculptures by the well-known artist Umberto Mastroianni exhibited in a temporary exhibition set up in the D’Annunzio Segreto space. According to estimates cited among others by HANDLE and RaiNews, the value of the stolen works would amount to a total of one million euros.
Mastroianni was the uncle of the famous actor Marcello Mastroianni and is considered one of the most important Italian artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition, called “Like a warm and fluid gold. The golds of Umberto Mastroianni”, was inaugurated last December 30th and should have ended on Friday March 8th. The day he writes that the Vittoriale employees noticed the theft and found the displays empty when they opened the exhibition space on Thursday morning.
The exhibition included a total of twenty sculptures and thirty jewels, including rings, bracelets and brooches, all made between the 1950s and 1990s with the ‘lost wax’ or ‘casting in gold’ casting technique, which imitates the of bronze or glass. The Salò carabinieri and the Brescia provincial command are investigating the case. The carabinieri of the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit of Monza, which is responsible for all of Lombardy, also intervened.
Born in the province of Frosinone in 1910, Umberto Mastroianni studied drawing in Rome and in 1926 moved with his family to Turin, where he began to dedicate himself in particular to sculpture. Initially he was influenced by the futurist movement, in particular by the works of Umberto Boccioni, and then approached neo-cubism. From the 1960s he also dedicated himself to engraving, and began to create sculptures, plates and jewellery, exploiting in particular materials such as gold, brass and steel.
He was a world-famous artist, who in his career won numerous prizes and recognitions, including the International Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1958 and the Tokyo Imperial Prize in 1989. In the same year he was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest honor awarded by the President of the Republic in Italy. He died on February 25, 1998 in his house-museum in Marino, just outside Rome. The Umberto Mastroianni International Center was created in 1993 and later became the Umberto Mastroianni Foundation.
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