Gianfranco Becchina is an Italian antiquities dealer who has been convicted in Italy of illegally dealing in antiquities.
Early life
Gianfranco Becchina was born in 1939 in Sicily. He is also known as Giovanni Franco Becchina.
Art dealing
Becchina owns the gallery Palladion Antike Kunst.
Becchina has supplied art objects to the
Ashmolean
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University ...
, the
Louvre
The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Rive Droite, Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement of Paris, 1st arron ...
, the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, the collectors
George Ortiz, Leon Levy and
Shelby White, the Merrin Gallery in New York, Japanese antiquities dealer Noriyoshi Horiuchi,
Dietrich von Bothmer
Dietrich Felix von Bothmer (pronounced ''BOAT-mare''; October 26, 1918 – October 12, 2009) was a German-born American art historian, who spent six decades as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he developed into the world's lead ...
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has collaborated with the art dealers Mario Bruno and Elie Borowsky, and sold material through Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses in London. Sometimes he used pseudonymes such as Anna Spinello (the married name of his sister).
Conviction for art trafficking
Becchina was convicted in Italy in 2011 of art trafficking. He appealed but the ruling was upheld.
Looted objects
In 2015 during an investigation into Gianfranco Becchina and his wife Ursula Jurascheka, a joint raid by the Swiss and Italian police discovered looted antiquities values in the tens of millions of dollars. In December 2019 the United States has filed a civil complaint seeking the forfeiture of an Attic Etruscan votive statuette that was recovered by the
FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...
and HSI years after it was illegally excavated and smuggled out of Italy. In 2023,
Matteo Messina Denaro, an organized crime boss in Italy claimed that he had links to Becchina whose assets were seized in connection to the investigation.
Efforts to recover looted antiquities that passed through Becchina are ongoing.
Further reading
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United States v. ONE ATTIC ETRUSCAN VOTIVE STATUETTE OF A FEMALE FIGURE
See also
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References
{{Reflist
Italian art dealers
Italian criminals