A priceless 16-century painting looted by the Nazis during World War II from Poland is finally returning to the country after it was discovered in Japan. The painting depicts Madonna with the child and is attributed to the Italian painter Alessandro Turchi. According to a report by AP, it is one of the 600 looted artworks that Poland has been able to bring back to the country. It was part of the Nazis’ list of the 521 most valuable pieces of art that were looted from Occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945.
There are still 66,000 so-called war losses which are yet to be recovered.
A report by BBC says that the painting was identified during an auction last January (Mainichi Auction Inc.) by Polish authorities who halted the auction. The owner of the valuable piece of art also agreed to return it to the country. Poland’s Culture Minister Piotr Glinski said that the painting was returned after negotiations with Japan and that the person who was in possession of the painting has decided to return it to Poland, without any costs. It was officially returned on Wednesday at the Polish Embassy in Tokyo.
The head of the ministry’s department for restitution of culture items Agata Modzelewska, said that the Polish side always stresses in negotiations that returning looted art is “the best moral and ethical gesture.”
It is unclear how Turchi’s ‘Madonna with child’ came to be in Japan, but it was sold by an auction house in New York in the late 1990s. The painting comes from a collection 18th century Polish aristocrat Stanislaw Kostka-Potocki. In 1823, the painting was listed among artworks belonging to another Polish aristocrat, Henryk Lubomirski, in the town of Przeworsk.
During WWII, it was common for Nazis to loot valuable artworks belonging to Jewish families. According to the BBC report, Kajetan Mühlmann, a Nazi official oversaw the looting of the artwork. In the late 1990s the painting was sold at a New York auction.
Poland recently launched a campaign seeking the return of hundreds of thousands artworks and other cultural items still missing after German and Soviet occupations in World War Two.