Lost and Found

A statement issued jointly by the Press Departments of the Toledo Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum yesterday announced that a painting has been stolen. The work, Children with a Cart (1778) by Spanish master Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), was en route from Ohio to New York when it went missing in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area.

Originally created as a tapestry design, Children with a Cart has been held by the Toledo Museum of Art since its 1959 purchase from a New York City dealer. The painting was meant to be included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's special exhibition Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth, and History, opening on November 17, 2006. Though its street value is nil, Children... is insured for $1 million (US) and its insurer is offering up to $50K (US) in reward money for information leading to its recovery. Any person with information regarding the painting is asked to contact the Philadelphia Division of the FBI at (215) 418-4000, or their local FBI office.

On the happy side of the "lost and found" coin, a nearly 200-year-old mystery over the whereabouts of two Fra Angelico (ca. 1387-1455) panels has been solved. The Guardian reported today that two paintings, once flanking the central panel of the Dominican friar's San Marco Altarpiece (1440-41) but missing since the Napoleonic Wars, have spent recent years hanging behind a door in an Oxford librarian's home.

Commissioned by patron Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464; patriarch of the Florentine banking family) to decorate the newly renovated chapel and convent of San Marco between the years 1440 and 1445, Fra Angelico made the altarpiece his first and top priority. Its central panel depicts (a, yes, predictable) Virgin and Child Enthroned, in which the seated Holy Family is surrounded by a cadre of standing and kneeling saints.

What was truly remarkable about the San Marco Altarpiece, though, was its predella or horizontal band below the main panel. Eight oil-on-poplar panels (four per side) flanked the central panel, and all eight contained scenes from the Lives of Saints Cosmas and Damian. Not exactly your standard 15th-century Saint fare, both were nonetheless the major patron saints of the Medici on the whole and favorites of Cosimo's in particular. (Though Fra Angelico tidied everything into a neat, overtly Dominican iconographic package, there is an undeniable "make the patron happy" message contained herein.)

Lifted during the Napoleonic Wars, six of the eight panels have long since been located in private collections, but the remaining two seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth - until now. Heirs to the librarian's estate say that the paintings will go on sale next year and are expected to fetch nearly $2 million (US). Wouldn't it be lovely if they could, perhaps, go back to Florence and rejoin the San Marco Altarpiece at the Museo di San Marco?

Related Reading:

• Special Exhibition Review: Fra Angelico

Image credit:

Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828)
Children with a Cart, 1778
Oil on canvas
145.4 x 94 cm (57 1/4 x 37 in.)
© Toledo Museum of Art