Maria Lai, no counterfeiting: two Cagliari gallery owners acquitted

They did not counterfeit the works of Maria Lai, the highly regarded artist from Ulassai who is now famous throughout the world. At the end of a long trial, with numerous experts and assessors taking the field for the prosecution and defense, the judge of the Court, Sara Caterina Ghiani, fully acquitted the Cagliari gallery owners Dante Crobu and Luigi Puddu, 62 and 45 years old, first reported and then sent to trial on the hypothesis of having counterfeited and put on the market a large number of works by the artist who died in 2013.

The exposed

The legal case arose following a series of complaints filed by the Maria Lai Archives denouncing the hypothesis that a series of fakes were circulating. Five years ago, after the investigations of the Carabinieri's Cultural Heritage Protection Unit were completed, one of the most well-known and respected art gallery owners in Sardinia, Dante Crobu, had gotten into trouble, defended by the lawyer Maurizio Piras.

The art expert had immediately defended himself, assuring that there had been no counterfeiting, but in the end the Prosecutor's Office had ordered the seizure of 23 paintings, later released by the Review Court. Among these, some fabric "Geographies", "Blackboards" and "Drawings" stand out, many of which were valued between 80 and 100 thousand euros. Luigi Puddu (son of a well-known painter from Jerzu) had also ended up in trouble for 7 works considered fake, assisted instead by the lawyer Pierandrea Setzu. "Those works are real and we have all the evidence to prove it", Crobu had said, immediately after the seizure, "I was the one who asked for them to be appraised. For a gallery owner and antique dealer this accusation is defamatory".

The complaint

The well-known art expert from Cagliari had claimed to have received the works from an elderly gallery owner from Sassari, the first to have held an exhibition on Maria Lai in 1960. Having been given the task of appraising them, he had contacted the Maria Lai Archive to complete the authentication: this was where the problems arose, given that those works had been deemed fake and the complaints had been filed. Both the Carabinieri del Ris and a large number of experts were called in to examine the fabrics and drawings, including Alessandro Ponzeletti, Roberto Concas, Caterina Ghisu and the famous art critic Elena Pontiggia. The signatures and writings in the fabric books were also verified. "It was tough," underlines the lawyer Setzu, "the trial became a real symposium on the artist with the major experts." The consultants and experts in the field were divided: some said that the works were real, others that they were fake. The figures at stake are significant, considering that a single “textile book” is priced on average around 50 thousand euros.

And yesterday morning, with the prosecution asking for a one-year sentence, the Court acquitted two gallery owners with the broadest formula: "The fact does not exist." The reasons for the sentence will be filed within 90 days.

Francis Pinna