Old Masters

LOOTED BY THE NAZIS, A ROMANINO IS RETURNED
by Paul Jeromack



Thanks to a sharp-eyed lawyer and a lax Italian museum, a highly important 16th-century painting of Christ Carrying the Cross, by the Brescian master Girolamo Romanino (ca. 1484/8-ca. 1560), looted by the Nazis in World War II, has been returned to the family of its original owner. The picture had belonged to Federico Gentili di Giuseppe, an Italian Jew who had settled in France. He died in 1941, just months before the Nazi army invaded France.

...more