Art: For Sale

At the foot of a curving staircase in the little modernistic Villa Sanseverino stands the last privately owned Michelangelo in the world, the Pieta Rondanini.* Every month, dozens of visitors go out to the outskirts of Rome by bus, ring the villa’s bell, and ask to see the unfinished, life-sized statue of the dead Christ and Virgin Mary on which the 89-year-old Renaissance master was working when he died. The 72-year-old Countess Ottavia Sanseverino has always let the tourists in, interrupting her meals and muddying her gleaming marble floors, even though one gaping art lover backed into one of her pieces of priceless Ming pottery and smashed it to bits.

But recently financial troubles forced the Sanseverinos to put their Pieta up for sale. They soon found that disposing of a masterpiece was not so easy. There were few prospective buyers for a work of art which Italian experts valued at $1,000,000 or more. Whoever bought it would also have to worry about a 90% government tax on the sale—and admit to a fortune which might be subject to more taxes in the future.

To make things even more difficult, the Italian government hoped to buy the statue itself, did its best to force the selling price down to a figure it could afford. As soon as the Pieta was announced for sale, the government’s council of fine arts promptly ruled that the Pieta might not leave Italy, thereby spiking any possible foreign offers, including a rumored $550,000 bid from the former White House envoy to the Vatican, Myron C. Taylor.-

By last week the question of selling the Pieta had become a national issue. Newspapers and radio comedians took it up. Thirty-five country schoolchildren in northern Italy had contributed 500 lire (90¢) “towards a national fund wherewith to purchase the Pieta.” But so far the best offers were a paltry $90,000 from the Italian government, $400,000 from a Milanese industrialist who hoped to place the Pieta over Michelangelo’s tomb in Florence’s Church of Santa Croce, but only if he could get the statue taxfree.

*Named for the Roman House of Rondanini, which owned the statue for generations.*In 1937, Mussolini’s officials had scotched the U.S. sale for another Michelangelo Pieta by put-ing a $2,500,000 export price tag on it; later an Italian bought it for about $250,000, presented it to the state.