About 120 artworks from the art collection of Italian national broadcaster Rai have either vanished or been replaced with fakes, Italian news publication, Il Messagero reports.

The Rai art collection has 1,500 artworks worth 110 million euros (€110 million). And from this collection, no fewer than120 sculptures, paintings, lithographs, tapestry; valuable art pieces by Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, and Giorgio De Chirico, which hung from the walls of the broadcasting company's headquarters, have seemed to vanish into thin air while others have fakes in their place.

The works which were acquired with proceeds from the television license fee paid for by Italian households had apparently gone missing for a long time before their disappearance was noticed by chance.

According to a report in Il Messaggero newspaper, who broke the story, the vanishing of the artworks was uncovered in March when executives at the broadcasting company discovered that a painting by the Florentine painter Ottone Rosai which had been hanging on the wall of Rai's headquarters was a fake after the painting fell and its broken frame revealed the deceit.

From there, a police investigation revealed that the original had actually been stolen in the 1970s by a Rai employee and sold. The employee, who is no longer working at Rai, was tracked down and apprehended, but unfortunately, he couldn't be charged for the theft due to the lapse of the statute of limitation.

The disappearances were reported to the public prosecutors in Rome by the management of Rai and an investigation had been initiated in conjunction with the art heritage squad with the Italian police authority, the Carabinieri, since March.

Thereafter, a survey of the known works in Rai's collection revealed that 120 pieces were missing which include four bronze and silver horse statues that were miniature copies of the iconic sculpture by Francesco Messina outside Rai’s Rome headquarters and a canvas depicting the Colosseum by the figurative painter Giovanni Stradone. 

Other bureaus of Rai outside the headquarters in Rome were also audited and it was uncovered that artworks have vanished from some of these bureaus as well.

"We are facing a series of disappearances that seem to be targeted," Rai executive Nicola Sinisi, who is charged with the broadcaster's artistic heritage, told La Repubblica.

The police suspect that most of the theft was orchestrated after the 1996 exhibition of Rai's art collection in Puglia. It is believed this raised awareness of potential art thieves that there were valuable artworks hanging with little to no protection around Rai's corridors.

Hopefully, the art fraud squad of the Italian Carabinieri will recover the artworks. To be able to help as an art collector, this Aworanka article about the smartphone app developed by Interpol to detect stolen art will come in handy.