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15 novembre 2006
Lost Renaissance Masterpieces Surface in a British Home
November 15, 2006
Arts, Briefly
Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER, The NY Times
Behind a door in a spare bedroom of a woman’s modest house in Oxford, England, hung two small paintings. She had persuaded her father to buy the works when she found them in a box of odds and ends in the United States in the 1960s and thought them “quite nice.” He paid a few hundred pounds for the poplar panels, each painted with the standing figure of a Dominican saint in tempera on a gold background. The woman, Jean Preston, an Oxford librarian who died this year at 77, learned only last year that the paintings were by the Renaissance master Fra Angelico. They were identified by an art historian, The Guardian of London reported, as long-lost pieces from one of the artist’s major works, the high altar of the monastery of San Marco in Florence, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici. The main panel remains at the monastery, but eight smaller paintings of saints were dispersed during the Napoleonic wars. Six are in private collections and galleries. The remaining two, Miss Preston’s, were left to heirs and were valued at $1.9 million by an auctioneer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/arts/15arts.html?ref=arts
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