Titled Portrait of Isabella d’Este and dated to the 16th century, the painting became the subject of an international legal battle after an Italian woman, Emidia Cecchini, tried to sell it in 2013.
Swiss police impounded the painting in a bank vault in Lugano in 2015, at the urging of the Italian government, which said Cecchini had failed to acquire the necessary export license to take the painting out of Italy.
Italy demanded its seizure on grounds it had been trafficked out of the country illegally to Switzerland.
Cecchini, who Swiss court documents said was convicted in Italy with two others for their role in exporting the picture, has always maintained the painting had been in Switzerland for a century, taken there by her relatives who at one time lived in the country, Swiss and Italian media have reported.
The Swiss Supreme Court said on May 29 that the conditions for the painting to be returned to Italy are not met, overturning a ruling last year by the country’s federal criminal court.
The criminal court had called for the painting to be transferred to Italy on the basis of mutual assistance in criminal matters.
The Supreme Court said a request based on international mutual criminal assistance conventions should only be met in the case of activity that is also criminal in the country receiving the request.
“Subject to any other international agreements, no state is required to apply foreign public law within its borders,” the Federal Tribunal said in a statement.
The portrait, a 24-inch by 18-inch oil-on-canvas of a noblewoman, resembles a charcoal study by da Vinci that hangs in Paris’s Louvre museum.
Carlo Pedretti, a former professor emeritus of Italian Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, who died last year, first identified it as a Leonardo but later denied the attribution.
Other scholars have dismissed any attribution to da Vinci.
Isabella d’Este was the Marchioness of Mantua and a prominent patron of the arts in Renaissance Italy.
