Christopher Marinello - "Sherlock Holmes" of Fine Arts

London - The Sitting Woman by Henri Matisse, which the Rosenberg family received back at the end of May? That is his work. The portrait of an aristocrat by El Greco recently returned to the descendants of the Jewish art collector Julius Priester? Also his merit. Less than two years after the establishment of Art Recovery, which specializes in locating and returning stolen or lost artworks, its director Christopher Marinello is a star, reported AFP.
    The media sometimes nicknames this fifty-three-year-old blue-eyed native of Brooklyn "Sherlock Holmes." "My colleagues laugh at that," Marinello says with a smile, pointing to a small book about the famous fictional detective that lies on one of the shelves in the company's London office.
    After leaving art studies (he claims due to lack of talent), he studied law. He made a name for himself at the Art Loss Register (ALR), where he worked for seven years. Now it is his competitor.
    He left ALR with several colleagues due to "differences in views." He founded Art Recovery in the fall of 2013 with the aim to "serve the art world ethically, responsibly, and legally." His company, which employs about ten people in London, around 15 in Delhi, and one each in New York and Milan, gathers data on stolen or lost artworks and aims to have the most comprehensive database of its kind in the world.
    Even while working for ALR, he managed to return several works. In 2011, for example, he helped find the famous photograph Wave by Czech photographer František Drtikol, which was stolen in Prague. It was found in California and returned to Prague after just two weeks. Or two years later, he discovered the painting The Garden by Henri Matisse in London, which had been stolen in 1987 from a museum in Stockholm.
    What are the details of his work? For instance, the return of the famous Matisse work Sitting Woman to the descendants of the French Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg was, in his words, "eighteen months of suffering," especially given the rather pedantic approach of the German authorities.
    Sometimes chance has helped him too. Like in the case of several works stolen in 2008 in California, valued at 30 million dollars. He received a message via the internet from a man from Slovenia named Darko, who allegedly knew where the works were. After Darko sent him photos of the works, Marinello involved the Los Angeles police in the case. "We pretended we were from the insurance company," he recounted. And the result? The operation was successful, the works were returned, and several people were arrested.
    It is therefore clear why this New York native, whose parents were Italians, does not want to talk about his private life.
    However, such secret operations are, according to him, exceptional; he mostly acts as a mediator. Like in one of the recent operations concerning a stolen sculpture by Auguste Rodin valued at 100,000 dollars. The entire operation began in 2011 when the work, stolen 24 years ago, was offered at an auction in New York. "Within a month, we had an agreement to return the work to its rightful owners," Marinello rejoices.
    Sometimes he also works for free. For example, when an artist contacted him who was robbed by a dishonest gallery, or when a London church asked him to track down a 17th-century bust stolen during the Nazi blitz, or when the police invite him to identify artworks.
    In return, sometimes the police give him a small gift - Marinello shows a helmet from Polish police, a tie from Interpol, or a calendar from Italian officers.
    His services are also free for museums. He would also like to focus on the artworks destroyed in recent months by radical Islamists from the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, which he wants to add to his database. Marinello is horrified by the actions of the Islamists. "This part of the world is the cradle of our civilization. We have no idea what is happening there, and monuments are being destroyed by bulldozers," he does not hide his dismay.