Rome (AFP)
The Italian justice must decide Wednesday on the authorization to leave the territory of "The Man of Vitruvian", famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, to be loaned to the Louvre Museum for a large exhibition dedicated to the Tuscan master.
The regional administrative court (TAR) of Veneto, which has to decide on this file, had suspended on October 8 the authorization to leave the territory of this drawing.
The court had been seized by an association for the defense of Italian heritage, Italia Nostra, for which this loan violates the code of cultural property.
The latter provides that "may not leave the territory goods constituting the main fund of a specific section" of a museum, an art gallery, library, art collection or bibliographic.
"The Vitruvian Man", kept at the Academy Gallery in Venice and insured for a value of one billion euros, is with the Mona Lisa one of the most famous works of Leonardo da Vinci. This small drawing on paper (34 cm x 24 cm) represents the proportions of human anatomy.
In its decision of 8 October, the TAR also suspended the agreement signed in late September in Paris between the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Louvre for the exchange of works by Leonardo da Vinci and the painter Raphael.
Under the agreement, Rome is to lend five works by Leonardo da Vinci to the Paris museum for a major exhibition commemorating the fifth centenary of the death of the master of the Renaissance, which opens on October 24 at the Louvre.
In addition to the famous "Man of Vitruvian", four drawings must make the trip, including study of landscape and study for the Adoration of the Magi, and a dozen works on loan from various Italian museums.
In return, paintings and drawings by Raphael will be loaned to Italy for the exhibition dedicated to him at the Quirinal Museum in Rome in March 2020.
The Italian Ministry of Culture judged a few days ago "incomprehensible" the suspension of the loan decided by the administrative court.
The exchange was decided "according to the specific rules of safeguarding (works) enacted by museums", which will appear with "clarity and transparency" at the hearing on Wednesday, he assured.
The previous Italian government, in which the Northern League of Matteo Salvini had a preponderant weight, had renounced to lend the works and marked his bad mood about the exhibition of the Louvre.
He had insisted that Da Vinci, who died five hundred years ago, was at first Italian, even though he had lived the last three years of his life in France.
© 2019 AFP