Italy livid about Da Vinci works going to Louvre
Louvre declines to comment or say which artworks it requested from Italy
Italy’s nationalist-tilting government is livid about plans by the Louvre museum in Paris for a blockbuster exhibit next year with as many as possible masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, loaned from Italian museums to mark the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance artist’s death.
“It’s unfair, a mistaken deal,” said Italian Culture Ministry Undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni, of a 2017 agreement between a previous government and the Louvre. “Leonardo is an Italian genius,” she said.
She was elaborating on comments earlier this month — in Italian daily Corriere della Sera — in which she said of Da Vinci: “In France, all he did was die.”
Da Vinci was born in 1452 in the Tuscan town of Vinci, and died in Amboise, France, in 1519.
The Louvre declined to comment on Italy’s objections, nor say which artworks it requested from Italy, noting it’s nearly a year before the four-monthslong exhibit opens on October 24, 2019.
“While respecting the autonomy of museums, national interests can’t be put in second place,” Borgonzoni told Corriere. “The French can’t have everything.” And it appears they won’t get all they want.
The Uffizi Galleries in Florence is considering loaning the Louvre several Da Vinci drawings.
But director Eike D. Schmidt said his museum is nixing the Louvre’s request for its stellar trio of the master’s paintings, because “simply, these works are so extremely fragile. No museum in the world would ever lend them.”
Last summer, when the three works were moved one flight up in the Uffizi, the transfer required preparations “like it was an expedition to Mount Everest, or a space trip to the Moon,” with restoration experts on hand just in case anything got damaged, Schmidt said.