Michigan Museum To Return

Two Stolen Paintings To Italy

AP – MICHIGAN MUSEUM TO RETURN TWO STOLEN PAINTINGS TO ITALY

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By James Prichard

Associated Press Writer

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH. (AP) — The Grand Rapids Art Museum will return two Fourteenth Century panel paintings to Italy after learning they were stolen from a church in that nation’s Abruzzo region more than a century ago.

The museum acquired the panels in 1947 in a trade with a New York art gallery without knowing they had been stolen, director Celeste Adams said April 4.

The pair of paintings is on display in Grand Rapids through May 4, then will be sent to Il Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo, or the National Museum of Abruzzo.

The Grand Rapids museum’s board of trustees voted unanimously to return the panels.

“This repatriation is not only the correct legal action, but it is also the right thing to do,” board President Michael Ellis said in a written statement.

The paintings, taken from the Church of St Eustace in Campo di Giove, Italy, formed part of a 16-panel altarpiece that depicts events in the saint’s life. St Eustace was a Roman general named Placidus who converted to Christianity and was executed in the Second Century.

The altarpiece was stolen in 1902 and remained missing until the mid-1920s, when two panels turned up in a Paris art market.

The museum acquired its panels from E.&A. Silberman Galleries in New York. They were from the collection of an Austrian count who immigrated to the United States before World War II, Adams said.

The museum traded a tiny Renoir painting for the Italian panels, which were cleaned the following year, in 1948.

Painted in tempera and measuring 25 by 13¾ inches each, they depict the saint’s conversion and his flight from a plague-ridden city.

As the art museum prepared to move into its new building, which opened in October, Adams received an e-mail asking about the panels from a graduate student in Italy. The student, Luca Nicoletti, was working with his professor on a reconstruction of the St Eustace altarpiece and requested photos of the museum’s two panels.

The inquiry led to discussions between the museum and several art scholars. Based on those exchanges, archival evidence of the theft and a request by the Italian government for the return of the panels, the museum’s trustees took action, she said.

“Repatriation of documented stolen works is an enormously important issue for museums today,” Adams said. “We cared for these works of art as good museum stewards for 60 years, and they can now become an important cultural asset for their home region.”