The fate of El Greco’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1610-14) hangs in limbo as Romania escalates its legal battle to reclaim the masterpiece, alleging it was looted from its national collection during the fall of the monarchy in 1947. The painting, pulled from Christie’s New York auction in February, remains under lock at the auction house while courts untangle its contested past—one that entwines Cold War-era royal flight, offshore transactions, and the shadowy dealings of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.
Romania’s government, represented by Nixon Peabody, has secured a legal hold on the work, ensuring it remains in place until the dispute is resolved. Court filings reveal Rybolovlev—infamous for his role in the Salvator Mundi saga and his protracted feud with Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier—acquired the El Greco in 2010 through an offshore shell company. However, Bucharest insists that the painting’s trail is tainted: it was never lawfully King Michael I’s to sell when he fled the Communist forces, nor did Romania consent to its removal.
Christie’s catalogue had listed the work as transferred to the exiled king in 1947 “with the accord of the Romanian government,” a claim the state vehemently denies. “There is no record of such consent,” asserts Romania’s Finance Ministry, branding the provenance “false.” The auction house, now dismissed from the lawsuit, maintains it acted in good faith, withdrawing the lot upon learning of the dispute.
The case revives decades-old tensions. From 1977 to 1997, Romania fought to recover artworks allegedly taken by Michael I, implicating galleries like Wildenstein & Co., which purchased the El Greco in the 1970s. Now, Deputy Prime Minister Barna Tánczos vows to “reunite this masterpiece with its rightful home” at Bucharest’s National Museum of Art.
El Greco: The Unquiet Visionary
Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in 1541 on Crete, then a Venetian outpost, El Greco forged an art of radical disquiet—elongated figures aflame with spiritual intensity, colours that vibrate like struck metal. Trained in Byzantine icon painting, he absorbed Venice’s chromatic brilliance under Titian, then Rome’s muscular dynamism from Michelangelo, only to shatter both traditions.
By 1577, he landed in Toledo, Spain’s spiritual epicentre, where his angular saints and liquefied skies scandalised patrons. The Disrobing of Christ (1579) provoked lawsuits over its audacious composition; The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586) fused earthly pomp with celestial delirium. King Philip II, recoiling from the artist’s Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, dismissed him as a madman—a verdict that condemned El Greco to outsider status even as Toledo’s intelligentsia embraced his genius.
His late works—View of Toledo’s storm-lashed mysticism, The Opening of the Fifth Seal’s apocalyptic frenzy—pushed mannerism into proto-expressionism. Dying in 1614 with debts unpaid and major commissions unrealised, he was forgotten for centuries until modernists reclaimed him as a forefather of artistic rebellion.