Wmistakes of the First World War: In the spring of 1918, the German Reich tried to advance beyond Amiens to the English Channel. The offensive, codenamed “Michael”, stalled after a few weeks, but days of bombing reduced parts of the Picardy capital to rubble. The municipal art museum, the first in France to be built specifically as such (under Napoleon III), was also hit. A gun exploded in the north-west pavilion, which housed fifteen large-scale nineteenth-century paintings. These include “Diana and Endymion” by David’s student Jérôme-Martin Langlois, on long-term loan from the Louvre. When a curator became interested in this work six decades after the end of the First World War, it was nowhere to be found. The last trace in the house inventory dates back to 1911. Had the picture fallen victim to the bombing? Had it already been removed from the Louvre collection and gotten into the wrong hands in undocumented ways? Has it even been embezzled?
In 2015, a curator at the Amiens Museum flipped through an issue of the Paris Match magazine. In a post about Madonna, he was struck by a painting that hung in the stairwell of one of the pop icon’s domiciles: Diana and Endymion. As it turns out, the art-loving singer had bought the work at a Sotheby’s sale in New York in 1989 for $1.3 million. The Musée de Picardie then filed a complaint against an unknown person for theft – the process does not seem to have gotten beyond this first step. Recently, the mayor of Amiens asked Madonna in a Facebook video that she borrow the picture in 2028. Then the city wants to be European Capital of Culture, for which Amiens – the birthplace of President Macron – recently registered his candidacy.
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