After a convoluted process dating back to 2018, the High Court of Justice of Andalusia has overturned a four-year prison sentence for a Spanish antiques dealer in a case involving an artwork from a 16th-century convent in an ancient Italian city just north of Rome, El País reports. reports El País.At the center of the saga is a five-foot-high, 17th-century Baroque wood sculpture known as Saint Margaret of Cortona, by Granada artist José de Mora. It had resided for decades at the convent of Our Lady of the Angels of Granada in Santa Rosa de Viterbo, founded in 1538. The convent closed in 2018, at which point a Sister Josefa arrived bearing a decree signed in Vatican City assigning her the task of transferring the institution’s holdings to other convents. Major decisions were to be approved by authorities in Rome, but Sister Josefa reportedly took it upon herself to handle matters directly, and a number of artifacts were sold.Antiques dealer Santos Boy Jiménez Cortés, from the town of Alagón near Zaragoza, visited the convent and purchased several artifacts, including the sculpture, for which he reportedly paid €21,600 ($25,500). Though he was unsure exactly what it was, he suspected it might be valuable. His intuition proved correct when he sold it to Madrid’s Nicolás Cortés Art Gallery for €90,000 ($106,250). The gallery then commissioned an expert report valuing the piece at €350,000 ($413,200). With export permits granted by Spain’s Ministry of Culture valuing the sculpture at €400,000 ($472,200), Cortés offered it at TEFAF New York in 2019. At the time, El País reported that the transaction appeared to run up against a 1985 heritage law prohibiting the church from freely trading its holdings.According to El País, when a visitor to a Madrid antiques dealer identified a bench as belonging to the Granada convent, he alerted police. The nuns then asked Jiménez Cortés to return everything they had sold him, but by that point the Saint Margaret sculpture was already in New York.In 2024, Jiménez Cortés was sentenced to four years in prison and fined €3,650 ($4,300) for misappropriating the work. He appealed the conviction, and the High Court of Justice of Andalusia has now overturned the sentence, describing the nuns’ account of events as “doubtful” and “hard to believe,” El País notes.In its ruling, the court said the nuns had offered differing versions of what happened. They claimed that rather than selling the sculpture to Jiménez Cortés, they had asked him to prepare a restoration budget. However, a specialist testified in court that the piece never required restoration, and Jiménez Cortés argued that it would have made little sense to involve a dealer in such a project. The court found that the nuns were unable to document having requested restoration and, in any case, would not have been able to commission one given their financial situation. The dealer’s account, the court concluded, was more plausible.The nuns also accused Jiménez Cortés of returning a poor copy instead of the original sculpture. After reviewing photographs of the alleged fake alongside images of the original, the court said the copy would never have convinced anyone. Moreover, it noted, Jiménez Cortés had refunded the convent what it had originally paid for the piece, raising the question of why he would also attempt to pass off a fake. The sculpture has since been returned and is now at the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada, while the convent of Our Lady of the Angels of Granada was ultimately sold to the Buddhist order of the New Kadampa Tradition, El País reports.