Flowers on canvas. The rediscovered art
- carlottaceccarini9
- Jun 28, 2022
- 3 min read
The Odyssey of Van Huysum's The Vase of Flowers, from his disappearance in 1943 to his return in 2019.
The documentary, premiered on Rai 5 in 2020 and now available in streaming on Ray Play in the Art Documentaries section, stages the looting of Tuscan works of art by the Nazis during the Second World War, reconstructed from the story by Emanuela Avallone and Silvia De Felice under the direction of Monica Madrisan.
Jan Van Huysum was a famous Dutch still life painter active in the early eighteenth century, who became famous for the naturalism of the rendering and the meticulous virtuosity of the details. His work for a long time at the center of artistic debates, The vase of flowers, was purchased in the early 1800s by Grand Duke Leopold II of Habsburg-Lorraine, a great lover of still lifes, of which he owned a large collection, started by Cosimo III de 'Medici, an admirer of Dutch painting and of which he was already the owner of numerous paintings.
In 1940 the Pitti Gallery was evacuated due to the outbreak of the Second World War and its precious works of art, 550 paintings and 11 sculptures, including the Dutch still life, were safely placed in wooden box which were moved several times from one Medici villa to another, traveling all over Italy to the north, up to Alto Adige.
In 1944 the leaders of the Nazi army, with the excuse of sheltering the prestigious coffers, took possession of them and with them also of their contents. The crates were transferred to Germany, but during the transport one of them broke and some "infidel" soldiers carried out a double theft, stealing a dozen of the stolen works of art. Until 1989 all traces of these works were completely lost.
Hitler had the desire to create a museum in Linz, the Austrian city that saw him grow and this was probably the reason why he had hundreds and hundreds of works of art confiscated throughout Europe during the Second World War. The Fuhrermuseum should have opened its doors in 1950 with works of high prestige: from Van Eyck to Michelangelo, from Rubens to Leonardo da Vinci, from Rembrandt to Tintoretto, from Goya to Velasquez and many other great names in the history of art and above all of the Italian Renaissance.
With the end of the Nazi dictatorship and then with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the holders of the stolen painting, with a photograph that reproduced the painting, turned to the Bavarian State Art Gallery, later author of the restoration of the painting, to verify its authenticity and actual value. From this moment investigations were opened but at the time did not lead to concrete results.
The owning family tried several times, quite obsessively, to sell the painting to the Italian state, requesting a ransom twice, in 1911 and 2011. An absurd request that was refused given the conditions under which the Germans had become the holders. These circumstances extended the negotiations for the return of Van Huysum's painting by a few more years, which were completed thanks to the oversight of one of the lawyers of the owner of The Vase of Flowers, who presented himself in person to the director of the Palatine Gallery, forgetting a folder in which contained documents proving the painting's belonging to the Italian State.
The Director of the Palatine Gallery in Florence, Eike Schmidt, made a provocative gesture to solicit interest in the question and a response from Germany, launching an appeal to his country for the return of the painting by Van Huysum, absent from the its original location for 75 years and replaced by provocation by a photographic reproduction accompanied by a large red writing "STOLEN!" in various languages.
A moment in which Italy and Germany, as happens in many other aspects of the tragic events of the Second World War, together reopen pages of history with courage, with transparency and with the desire not to forget and simply turn the page, but to resolve certain knots that had remained unsolved, as in the case of this work of art. (Luigi Mattioli, ambassador of Italy in Berlin 2018-2021)
The vase of flowers, one of the Dutch masterpieces of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a survivor of the Great War, represents a triumph of bright colors that branch out within light lines and volumes. A meticulous attention to detail, Van Huysum's is a "micro painting", able to make the painting look like a real photograph. An odyssey destined to end only on 19th July 2019 when the painting returned definitively to the Uffizi collections, in the hope that it will be the first restitution of works of art in a long series.
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