The mayor of Amiens in northern France has launched a video “requesting” that Madonna “loan” the city a painting from her private assortment, which resembles one lost there throughout World War I.
The 19th-century work, Diane And Endymion by artist Jerome-Martin Langlois, is “doubtless” the identical one “loaned by the Louvre to the Fine Art Museum in Amiens earlier than World War I and which subsequently disappeared”, Brigitte Foure stated in a video message to the Queen of Pop posted on Facebook.
“Obviously, we do not dispute in any method the authorized acquisition that you simply made of this work,” Foure added.
Instead she requested the singer for a “loan” to exhibit it in 2028, when Amiens hopes to be the yr’s European Capital of Culture.
Lending the picture would enable “the inhabitants to find this work and luxuriate in it,” the mayor stated.
The painting’s doable provenance was prompt by newspaper Le Figaro in an investigation printed this month.
Sold at public sale for US$1.3mil to Madonna in 1989, an artwork conservator noticed the monumental work in a photograph of her residence printed within the journal Paris Match.
It represents a mythological scene of the bare-breasted goddess Diana approaching the shepherd Endymion.
“I’m not sure that it is the precise painting”, however even when a replica, “it is extraordinarily much like the work” and “I’d just like the individuals of Amiens to have the ability to see it once more,” Foure stated.
Langlois’ authentic work was ordered in 1817 to embellish the royal Versailles palace outdoors Paris, stated Francois Seguin, interim director of the Picardie Museum – previously Amiens’ Fine Art Museum.
It was loaned by Paris’ Louvre Museum to the northern city from 1872, till being declared lacking after World War I.
Madonna’s painting “is sort of definitely a replica, most probably by the artist himself”, the Louvre stated when it exhibited the painting in 1988.
Her model lacks the artist’s signature, the date of the work and his stamp, and is round 3cm (one inch) smaller than the unique, making it “not very doubtless” that it is the identical work, professional Seguin stated.
Nevertheless, “it is the one proof of the work that was lost,” he added. – AFP
