Painting stolen by Nazis back in Florence museum
FLORENCE, Italy — A Dutch still-life painting, stolen by retreating Nazis and sent by a German soldier as a present to his wife, was returned to a Florence museum Friday, thanks largely to a relentless campaign by the Uffizi Galleries’ director, a German.
The foreign ministers of Germany and Italy were on hand Friday at Palazzo Pitti, a Renaissance palace that is part of the Uffizi Galleries, for the unveiling of “Vase of Flowers,” a masterpiece by Jan van Huysum, an early 18th-century artist whose exquisitely detailed still-life works were highly sought in his day.
Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt urged his native country earlier this year to return the work. He had posted on a gallery wall three labels where the painting had hung before being taken during World War II: “stolen,” the labels read in Italian, English and German.
His homeland, Schmidt said at the time, had a “moral duty” to return the work.
Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero hailed the “civic and moral courage of a German director of an Italian museum” in pursuing the painting’s return. As did his German counterpart, Moavero hailed the happy ending, saying it was achieved through “real Europeanism, of concrete facts” and not just words.
He revealed to reporters that the painting’s return was discussed during bilateral talks between Italy and Germany.
“Vase of Flowers” is so realistic it has been likened to a photograph. Van Huysum used a magnifying glass to study his subjects. Ripples are visible in insects’ transparent wings, to name just one striking detail on the painting.
The painting was acquired in 1824 by a grand duke of the Habsburg-lorraine dynasty, which followed the Medicis in residing in the palace in Florence.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the palace’s artworks were packed for safekeeping into wooden crates and moved from villa to villa. When the German army was retreating, the crates were added to other war booty and ended up in Bolzano, near Austria. There the crate containing “Vase of Flowers” was opened, and in July 1944, a German soldier sent the painting to his wife in Germany.
The painting’s whereabouts appeared to be a mystery until a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Starting in 1991, the family repeatedly tried to sell the painting to Italy, “threatening to give it to a third party or even destroy it if a ransom wasn’t paid,” the Italian culture ministry said.