Italian police track down lost Nazi loot
April 25 2016
Picture: Carabinieri
The Italian Carabinieri have tracked down and seized three important Renaissance pictures that had been missing since the war. The paintings had been part of the collection of Felix of Bourbon-Parma, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and were seized by the SS in 1944. They are: a Madonna with Child attributed to Cima da Conegliano; the Trinity by Alessio Baldovinetti; and the Presentation of Jesus to the Temple by Girolamo dai Libri, above, which is signed. Reports The Art Newspaper:
Occupying German troops seized the works in 1944, transporting them to Dornsberg castle, the South Tyrol headquarters of Karl Wolff, the SS commander who negotiated the Nazi surrender in Italy in 1945. At the end of the war, US soldiers from the so-called “Monuments Men” raided the castle. A number of works from the Bourbon-Parma collection were returned to the family in 1949, but the three paintings remained missing.
Following what it described as a “complex investigation” based on archival documents, a branch of the Carabinieri art crime unit in Monza, northern Italy, traced the works to the descendants of two Milanese collectors in December 2014. The paintings are in state custody but will be stored at the Pinacoteca di Brera while authorities decide whether to restitute them to Luxembourg, La Stampa reports.
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Update - and here below is an extremely rare case of a black glove shot.
