Italian Supreme Court Rules on Vedova Plagiarism Case

The Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione) has finalized a long-running plagiarism case involving works by Pierluigi De Lutti that were exhibited and sold in 2007 by an unnamed gallery. The court's ruling, issued on January 26, 2018 (sentence no. 2039), confirmed that De Lutti's works, belonging to the Art Informel movement, plagiarized those of Emilio Vedova. De Lutti and the gallery were ordered to pay 300,000 euros in damages to the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova. The court established that the plagiarized works were nearly superimposable on Vedova's, sharing identical positioning of planes, chromatic masses, and proportions, with only minor differences deemed simplifying or commercial. The gallery was held jointly liable for failing to exercise professional diligence in verifying the authenticity of the works, as required by the Italian Cultural Heritage Code (D. Lgs. n. 42/2004, art. 64). The ruling also defined plagiarism as the reproduction, in whole or in part, of the creative elements of another's work, assessed through comparison based on criteria set by the Supreme Court.