 |
| Domenico Tiepolo. Trojan Horse series in three parts at the
Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum –
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Autumn 2020 – Winter 2021. Photo
(C) Hannu Pakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National
Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. |
By
Inna Rogatchi (C)
With special thanks to inspired and inspiring colleagues:
director of Amos Rex Museum, Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Sinebrychoff Art
Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Kirsi Eskelinen, chief curator of the
Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery Dr Ira Westergard, researcher
at the University of Helsinki Kersti Tainio.
From Unremarkable
Acquisition To Major Re-discovery
This year, the end of April 2021, marks the 25th anniversary of
a very special art acquisition which resulted in one of the most stunning
re-discoveries in the present day art history. In April 1996, an initially
unremarkable acquisition was made by the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki,
Finland. It was an Italian artwork of the XVIII century, by an anonymous
artist. As it turned out, it was the beginning of an extraordinary story which
has become the subject of my forthcoming art historical documentary.
Eight months after the acquisition, in December 1996, the Museum
and the Finnish National Gallery had had to call the press-conference. There it
was announced that since now on, the Museum owns not one Tiepolo, as it was
known since the Museum’s establishing, but two of them, with the second work
being identified as the masterpiece of Domenico Tiepolo, the son of the great
Venetian master of the XVIII century and the famous artist himself.
The work resurrected in Helsinki in 1996 was not an ordinary piece of art. It was the
missing part of the series created by Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse, the
series which were widely well known and described in the art literature in
detail.
Helsinki, 2020-2021: first unification of Tiepolo’s Trojan Horse
triptych in more than 200 years
Year 2020 was the time of the 250th anniversary of the death of
Domenico Tiepolo’s father, the great Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo. In
commemoration of it, the Sinebrychoff Art
Museum in Finland has organised a gem of an exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the North, which I
dubbed as ‘the exhibition of
discoveries’ .
It was at that exhibition, when one of the most notable events
in the world of fine arts in recent time has occurred. For the first time in
over 200 years, the series originally created as the three-parts entity by
Domenico Tiepolo on Trojan Horse has been exhibited in its entirety. For the
first time in over 200 years, the two parts of that notable work which belongs
to
the London National Gallery for over the century, were united with its
third part which was presumed to be lost
under the most dramatic circumstances, at the most dramatic time, before it
resurrected in Finland, over 70 years ago, and was re-identified a quarter of
century ago.
 |
| Domenico Tiepolo. Trojan Horse series in three parts at the
Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum –
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. Autumn 2020 – Winter 2021. Photo
(C) Hannu Pakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National
Gallery, Finland. With kind permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. |
Helsinki, 1996: the
missing part
It was a regular monthly auction at Hagelstam auction house in
Helsinki in April 1996, with a few potential buyers presented, and with nothing
extraordinary mentioned in the preliminary published catalogue. Among those
several people at the well-known Hagelstam auction rooms, there was a young
curator from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. When he saw the photo of the work
planned for sale at Hagelstam a bit earlier, he who always had a soft spot for
Tiepolo, was thinking to himself: “Hmm,
this dark old work of Venetian art does resemble Tiepolo , or his workshop,
perhaps”. Today, Kai
Kartio, now one of the leading
culture figures in Finland, director of the new and popular Amos-Rex Museum recalls the events of
the 25 years back in our conversations, with still recognisable amazement.
The bid was quite low, and the young curator had had the mandate
from the Museum’s director at the time for such modest purchases which would
fit a very small acquisition budget that the Museum had in the mid 1990s.
As Kai Kartio recalls today, ‘at
the time when we still operated in Finnish marks, the estimate was equivalent
to a few hundreds Euro”. There were other bidders for the work, as well, so
when Kai eventually got the painting for the museum, its price fetched the sum
which was the equivalent of under 2000
Euro. The Sinebrychoff Art Museum does not commit itself for public estimate of
their treasure, understandably. According to some professional Italian
estimates, the works could be conservatively valued today at 500 – 600 thousand
Euros.
 |
| Domenico Tiepolo. The Greeks Sacking Troy. 1773-1775. (C)
Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. With kind
permission of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. |
Being an able researcher,
at the Helsinki University library, he consulted the best possible source,
published in Munich and Zurich 8-volumed detailed catalogue of iconography of
Christian symbols in art, Lexikon der
christlichen ikonographie.
“ As it turned out, the
subject of the Trojan Horse has been depicted in art surprisingly rarely, – Kai
Kartio told me recently, – and the
Domenico Tiepolo’s series of three paintings on the subject were well-known and
properly described in that really extremely thorough Lexicon. Moreover, at the
Lexicon, there was also mentioned that the article in the German art magazine
Pantheon, the leading German art publication at the time, has written about the
one of the works in the series in particular in the 1930s, due to the big
Tiepolo exhibition in Chicago where it has been shown.”
 |
| Dr Kai Kartio, director of the Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki. (C)
Jussi Mankkinen. With kind permission of Dr Kai Kartio. |
After reading the description at the Lexicon, Kai Kartio ran to
Finnish National Gallery archive where, as he knew, they had kept some of the
Pantheon magazines, due to ‘the extremely
close ties between Germany and Finland before the WWII in the culture field’,
he mentioned. He found it.
When Kai opened the issue of Pantheon magazine on international
art from 1930, he saw the picture of the
work which he had just bought at the Hagelstam monthly auction a few months
before for peanuts as the work of ‘anonymous, Italy, XVIII century” .
“Of course, I went to see
Wenzel Hagelstam, the head of the auction house ( and the long-term host of
the Finnish franchise of Antic, Antic TV-show), and showed him my discoveries. He was completely stunned. My quest for
him was any documentation regarding the work which the auction house might
have, and of course, I wanted to know now who was the seller, and any possible
circumstances around the sale”, – recalls Kai Kartio.
From that moment on, the story around Domenico Tiepolo’s The
Greeks Sacking Troy in a blink of
an eye has moved half a century back, and brought us to Berlin soon after the
end of the Second World War, in 1948.
In the saga of tracing the provenance of the 245-year-old work
by Tiepolo-son undertaken by my Finnish colleagues, aspiring and thorough art
historians, this aspect and time period has attracted my attention in
particular, due to my own historical research in different aspects of the
post-Second World War period. I have
spent several months looking at the specific aspects of the history of this
painting: all possible circumstances in connection with the work in a period
between 1930 and 1948, historical, cultural and human context of the
astonishing adventures of the Venetian master’ masterpiece.
Berlin, 1948: Unanswered questions. How Tiepolo Jr. has become
‘an anonymous artist’?
The man who unexpectedly for himself has become into possession
of the dark, unclear work of ‘anonymous
Italian artist’ was Finnish diplomat Tauno Sutinen who was stationed in Germany
before and during the Second World War as the Second Secretary of the Embassy
of Finland in Berlin. He had to return
to Finland from Germany rather abruptly in 1944. Many of his dealings in
Germany, including his ongoing relations with a certain art-dealer there, were
left in the middle.
When Sutinen realised that he won’t be returning back to Germany
as planned originally, he asked some of his acquaintances there to handle these
unfinished businesses on his behalf. This is how the batch of six artworks from
Berlin had eventually got to Helsinki in 1948, preceded by the letter of
Sutinen’s acquaintance in Berlin describing that in return of the money that he
left with the dealer, the later provided several artworks, including the
one ‘rather
impressive work by an anonymous Italian artist of the XVIII century’. The work was marked in the letter as being
worth 15 000 RM ( Reich Marks) by the German art dealer. The sum in 1948 was
equivalent of $ 6000. It is comparable to 55.000 Euros of the money value of
today.
From that time onward, Domenico Tiepolo’s unrecognised
masterpiece had been hung on the Finnish diplomat’s wall at his apartment in
Helsinki. More than twenty years after his death in 1974, followed by the
consequent death of his widow, the family decided to sell some of their art via
Hagelstam auction.
The dealer in Berlin who sent the batch of six artworks to Tauno
Suutinen in 1948 via certain Georgy Ribakoff was Herbert Ulrich. As
established by the Finnish researchers, in 1944, the gallery was bombed
severely, but he was able to resume his business, at the other location,
surprisingly quickly, as early as in 1946, running it until his death in 1991.
The business continued after his passing, and I saw that there is an art
gallery with this name in the prestigious area of Berlin today.
Why on earth a savvy German art dealer in Berlin has decided, in
the immediate aftermath of the Second
World War, to attribute a well-known and properly described artwork as the work
of ‘an anonymous artist’. What he was aiming to hide? Whom, when and how did he
get the work from?
The only reason prompted him to change The Greeks Sacking Troy’s authorship from Tiepolo
to ‘ an anonymous’ was the previous owner of the work, or a middleman who dealt
in the total upheaval of the art market during WWII. The most tricky detail
which was brought to public attention as recently as in the autumn 2020, by the
publication of the findings by the Finnish art historians Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti
Tainio ( Travelling with Tiepolo, Helsinki, 2020) is the fact of the cut of
the top edge of the label note on the back side of the work’s frame. The note
is in German, and it describes the topic of the work. As the Finnish
researchers justly noticed, with the photograph illustrating their point, the
note is cut precisely at the place where the name of the artist is supposed to
be.
When I undertook my own art historical research based on
professional thorough work of my colleagues from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in
Helsinki, I was looking into any possible further lead coming of their
discoveries, in the given period between 1930 and 1948. In the beginning of my
research, I was electrified to see the name of the art dealer in Paris who, as
it was established recently, had the Tiepolo’s work in his possession until
1942.
London 1945: A very special intelligence unit. In search of
looted art of Europe.
I was electrified because I knew that name already. I came
across it in the course of my previous research related to post-WWII Europe and
the US. I saw that name in the OSS ( the US Intelligence) files on wanted
Nazis. At the time of completing the files, in 1945-1946, the OSS in Europe was
overwhelmed with the volume of their tasks. Established special unit gathering
intelligence on looted art known as ALIU was actually run by just ten people
who were supposed to get to the bottom of that incredible, giant looting organised by the Nazis that swept Europe
during the six years of the war.
In the course of their
round o’clock work, ALIU experts were able to distill the mess of personalities
involved in the process of the Nazi crimes against culture down to 2000
individuals, both Nazi officials tasked with mass art looting and those dealers
and middlemen who cooperated with them eagerly.
I have been working on
the theme of looted art since the early 1990s, and have first-hand knowledge
about how the process of investigation of that aspect of the Nazi crimes had
been evolving from its very start in 1945. My knowledge comes from a number of
great people who did participate in it personally, including late Simon
Wiesenthal who was working closely with the OSS in Austria in particular
with regard to Hitler beloved project, his future Linz Art Museum, a giant operation which had
an undisputed priority among all Reich projects on looted art.
Among them is also a legendary Peter Sichel who was
running super-secret the CIA Strategic Unit in Berlin from 1946 onward, leading
art dealer and art historian Achim Moeller , professor Konrad
Kwiet who was the Chief Historian at the Commission of the Nazi Crimes
Investigation in Australia, as well as former minister for foreign affairs of
the Czech Republic and mentor of Vaclav Havel, dear friend Prince Karel
von Schwarzenberg, whose family’s property and possessions had been
looted by the Nazis in the Czech Republic, and the others.
 |
| Inna Rogatchi and Simon Wiesenthal at the Wiesenthal’s office in
Vienna, 1995. (C) Michael Rogatchi. Courtesy: The Rogatchi Archive. |
Based on that massive first-hand knowledge, I would like to
emphasise that if the OSS and its Art
Looting Intelligence Unit, ALIU, back in 1945-1946 has put a certain art dealer
in their Wanted List, known also as Red-Flag List, it means that the evidence
against that person’s dealing with the Nazis were overwhelming.
Paris, 1940-1942: Murky dealer, trustee of the Nazis, at particular
Paris address
Italian Mario d’Atri who was residing in Paris for many years, ran
his art dealership business there,
and he also had a registered business address in Rome.
The both addresses are mentioned in the OSS ALIU Red-Flag list and reports,
most likely given by the interrogated senior German art looters who were buying
from d’Atri.
I have looked into both of these addresses in detail. There
cannot be two more different business addresses, indeed. In Rome, the address
at 28, via Lima gets us to off-centre street in Parioli area, and to quite
unremarkable building which most likely was d’Atri residential address in Rome
or the place of his storage which would be very convenient at such casually
looking unkempt place.
The address in Paris which he boasted on specially printed
cards, just cannot be more different. He boasted about it for a very good
reason. Firstly, rue la Boetie in the
most prestigious 8th arrondissement of Paris was known as the place of
concentration of the several most prominent art dealership businesses. But the
specific number 23 on the street was known to everyone in the art world in
Paris and beyond it as ‘a Picasso address’.
When Pablo Picasso finally got married, for the first time, at the
age of 37, in 1917, his first wife was
well-known Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlov, the star of the Djagilev’s Le Ballet Russes. Picasso
himself was deeply involved as a set and dress designer in several of
Djagilev’s productions at the time. Being finally married, Picasso needed
respectability and a prestigious address in Paris to live and work at and a
high-class milieu to be associated with.The couple was arranged to live and
Picasso to work at 23, rue La Boetie, the address registered at the OSS ALIU
entrees for d’Atri.
 |
| 21-23, rue la Boetie, Paris. Photo: Inna Rogatchi. |
Significantly, Picasso’s way of work and life at that stage was
secured and paid for by his principal
dealer Paul Rosenberg whose famous gallery was situated at the next
building, at 21, rue La Boetie, and who also lived with his family there.
Picasso lived and worked at 23, rue la Boetie until the war when
he changed his Parisian address. Even then, he still was renting his two floors
at 23, rue la Boetie until 1951, and would continue to do so, unless the French
government decided to end unused leases which was the case for him and 23, rue
la Boetie at the time.
As for his dealer and owner of the neighbouring house at 21, rue
la Boetie, almost all Rosenberg family, except his brother and his son who
fought the Nazis with the Allied forces, had left Paris in February 1940. With
the occupation of Paris in June 1940,
everything that Rosenbergs has left behind, has been confiscated and
seized by the Nazis.
Everyone who is walking today via central rue la Boetie in the
prestigious 8th arrondissement of Paris, is welcome to read quite a visible
memorial plaque at number 21.
 |
| Memorial plaque on the facade of the former Rosenberg family’s
house and business, at 21, rue la Boetie, Paris. Photo: Inna Rogatchi. |
But there is more. 21, rue la Boetie in Paris is a screaming
address not only in the history of art, but in modern history in general. In
the utterly mocking gesture, the Nazis did establish at the address infamous L’Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives ( IEQJ) , happily ran by French
anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators organisation whose mainly business was to
create and produce outrageous, insulting propaganda products of vile
anti-Semitism. The whole operation was supervised by the Goebbels ministry and
was conducted by the infamous German Embassy in France.
No wonder that after the war, despite the fact that the French
state returned the house to the Rosenbergs, they found it impossible to live
there, either on 21, rue la Boetie, or in France. For the rest of his life (he
died in 1959 in New York), Paul Rosenberg would be looking for looted from him
by the Nazis and their enthusiastic collabos,
as the Nazi collaborators were known in France, as many as 400 paintings, the
gems of the world art, from Rembrandt to post-Impressionists.
The OSS ALIU red-flag register and some of the unit’s reports
has provided us with clear indications whom Mario d’Atri was dealing with among
the Nazi senior art looters. Mentioned there are Walter Andres Hofer, the
director of the Göering art looted collection, and Kajetan Muhlmann, super-active minister for Fine Arts in
post-Anschluss Austria, who led a total looting of Poland and Holland, and who
is regarded as one of the most notorious art looters in the XX century.
 |
| The Nazis at the Louvre. Commons Images Open Library. |
In the course of my
research, I did revisit various information from different sources regarding
notable Nazi personalities involved in the mass art looting at the given places
and time, in between Paris and Berlin from 1940 to 1944, and in the post-war
Germany until 1947.
With regard to Hofer, the thing is that the director of the
Göering personal art collection after being detained by the US Army in 1945,
tried very hard to be useful, and he ‘sang’ it all in an amazing detail. There
are several entries in the OSS internal reports mentioning that ‘Hofer seemed to remember every transaction’ during
the past six years ( of WWII). In the fountain of Hofner’s super-detailed
testimonies in 1945, however, there was
no mention of the work by Domenico Tiepolo which would be the case if he would
handle it. It was also not a major loot
– as a work by Rembrandt would be – , so in the way which Hofet has
chosen to behave with his American captors, he had no reason for hiding it.
It leaves the experts looking for the person who bought
Tiepolo’s artwork from d’Atri, with a possible lead to Muhlmann and one more
figure. We’ll come back to that most
intriguing part of the story a bit later, after understanding how Mario d’Atri
has got the Tiepolo-son’s work in the first place, where, when and from whom?
Paris, 1930: the same
dealer, trustee of the Stalin agents
According to the publication in the Pantheon magazine in 1938,
the work at the important Tiepolo exhibition in Chicago was presented by Mario
d’Atri, with a note next to the illustration: “[ From the ] Coll[ection] of the
Soviet Trade Representative Office, Paris, France”. In 2020, those two facts
were clearly presented in the important study into the work’s provenance
undertaken by Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio in Finland ( Travelling with
Tiepolo, Helsinki, 2020). And it has been known to the Tiepolo experts before.
These two facts are telling us that from 1930 till 1938 at least, the work was
at d’Atri’s hands, being sold to him by the official representatives of the
Soviet Union.
Tiepolo’s work was sold to a murky Italian art dealer in Paris in
an aggressive selling spree of the Soviet state treasures ordered by Stalin in
1929.
I have started to research the matter in detail from the end of
the 1990s. The first wave happened in the early 1920s and was ordered by Lenin,
with a truly vicious role played in that first wave of total sale-out played by
American Armand Hammer who had several one-to-one long private meetings with
Lenin planning the operation.
With the second wave, the
Soviet leaders were hoping to get enough resources for massive
industrialisation of the country, plus all non-declared expenses, such as
military ones. Because it has been done in a massive number of the most revered
art treasures in the world, during the short period of time, hastily and unprofessionally, with involvement of
unqualified people, the result was the over-flooding of the international
market, with inevitable sharp dumping, dropping prices in a half.
There is more. Not well known publicly facts are telling that in
that rush, the emissaries of the USSR acting abroad had clumsily left a huge
number of the precious artworks in the German hands shortly before Hitler’s
reign began. With the Nazis’ seisure of power, that clumsiness had empowered
the Third Reich with all those art treasures. The Nazis were only happy to handle the Soviet art left in their hands,
selling it professionally and at high prices, plus a bonus of mockery over the
Kremlin on the matter.
When I was busy with looking into the different aspects of the
history of the looted art in the end of
the 1990s-beginning of the 2000s, I spoke several times with a top Russian
official who was supervising the quiet official look into the real inventory
books of the Hermitage and other leading Russian museums, preparing a special
internal report for the Russian authorities on what has country really lost
during its Soviet history. Once he was sighing deeply, and said: “It is so awful that we cannot produce this
report, we just cannot publish it, even for the internal use”. They never
did. But we know the part of that tragic for art and culture story.
With regard to the Soviet agents’ art sale activities in Paris,
the point here is that in France in the 1930 it was impossible to make any
official transactions because the trade between Soviet Union and France was
forbidden and illegal. It means that a representative of the Soviet
authorities, or Komintern agent who was tasked to sell the Domenico Tiepolo’s artwork from the Hermitage collection in
Paris had had to cooperate with a
trusted person — who would be able to re-route the transaction via some third
country, as Switzerland, for example.
D’Atri could do it, for sure. He had a very suitable Swiss
connection in the art dealership world for that, to whom we will return. He
could also pay cash to his counter-agent from the Soviet Trade Office, as it
was an accepted practice in that Stalin operation which I dubbed ‘Art for
Might’. The operation actually resulted
in a complete fiasco. The proceeds of all those impossible sales of the
national treasures fetched just 1% of the USSR budget at the time, as the
internal Communist Party audit conducted after Stalin’s death has shown.
Helsinki, 2016-2020 —
Tracing the destiny of the Domenico Tiepolo work
Twenty years after the
re-discovery in Helsinki, Kai Katrio’s successor, chief curator of the
Sinebrychoff Art Museum Dr Ira Westergard and working with
her researcher at the Helsinki University Kersti Tainio embarked onto an
incredible journey. The purpose of their project was to research the provenance
of this work in detail. They did a very good job, with publishing their
findings in a catalogue of the fascinating Tiepolo exhibition in Helsinki in
the autumn 2020.
 |
| Dr Kirsi Eskelinen, director, Sinebrychoff Art Museum ( on the
right) and Dr Ira Westergard, chief curator of the museum, next to the
Tiepolo’s artwork at the exhibition at the museum in Helsinki. 2020. Photo:
Hannu Hakarinen. Credit: Sinebrychoff Art Museum-Finnish National Gallery,
Finland. With kind permission of the Museum. |
We have discussed the matter with Ira several times, in a
painstaking detail, with a particular aspect of it in close attention. “Knowing
the story of this particular painting, before anything else, we started to look
in all detail at possible belonging of the work to some of Jewish families or
collectors. It was an imperative for us to turn every stone in this direction.
Of course, it is impossible to say anything on that period with 100% assurance,
it would be simply unprofessional, but I can state that within a very thorough
two-year research project and specifically looking into that very matter we did not come across any Jewish
ownership of the work neither in the given period, or any other one” – Ira
confirmed to me.
Yet before this effort was undertaken by the museum a few years
back, Finnish National Gallery had examined the opportunity immediately after the astonishing news of
re-discovering Tiepolo instead of acquiring ‘an unknown Venetian artist of
XVIII century’. “Can you imagine that the
leading state art institution in Finland would not investigate this
possibility? – Kai Kartio told me. – In Finland, it is out of question. Absolutely out of question.
As we know, many museums in many countries did allow for itself to keep the art
with painful history, namely, looted by the Nazis from the Jewish families. It
has happened in many cases in Austria, and as unbelievable as it is, it still
is happening in France. But in Finland, we would examine every turn of the
history and provenance of the work, especially knowing what kind of dealers it
had been with during the war, both d’Atri and Ulrich. And we would react
absolutely appropriately here if anything of this sort would be found out. But
it was not”.
I was also relieved to read about the official statement by the
leadership of the Finnish Jewish community made in 2018 in the course of the
Sinebrychoff Museum provenance research project confirming that they did not
find any traces of such possibility in the course of their separate
investigation of the matter. Before that, yet back in the end of the 1990s, the
Jewish community of Finland had made an official request to the World Jewish
Congress to investigate. The result was that there is no evidence of the fact
that the work had belonged to a Jewish family.
The story of this painting is a truly rare case when being such
a treasure and being in the hands of not one but two very dubious art dealers
during the Second World War, being deprived of its authenticity, with its
author concealed deliberately in alarming post-war period in Berlin of all
places, it turned out as most likely, not being stolen from a Jewish owners. It
was an important relief for me personally, too.
But how Domenico Tiepolo’s masterpiece which was created by him
in 1773-1775 in Venice as a part of a three-works series, found its way apart
from them?
St Petersburg, 1817:
famous action of Tiepolo dealer’s trove
The Tiepolo family was highly popular in the highest echelons of
the Russian Empire at the time when St Petersburg was thriving with the
appearance of many new superb palaces, including the Winter Palace.
Back in the end of the XVIII – beginning of the XIX century,
very shrewd and experienced Italian art-dealers certainly did not let such a
lucrative opportunity be missed. The one of the most known of them, Niccolo
Leonetti, after the death of Domenico Tiepolo in 1804, travelled to
Russia with a trove of Domenico’s, his father and his brother’s works as soon
as the circumstances of the post-Napoleon invasion of Russia did allow it, in
1814. He started to work quite actively in St Petersburg, but his luck did not
last for long. Leonetti died in St Petersburg just two years after his arrival,
in 1816. Soon after that sudden death, a big auction was organised in St
Petersburg in 1817, with trading of over 250 art works by Italian masters,
including 23 of them created by father and sons Tiepolo.
“We found and saw the
catalogue! – Ira Westergard was telling me with beaming eyes. – The original catalogue of the auction in
1817 in St Petersburg”. In that superb discovery, the experts saw the
entries of three works depicting the Trojan Horse theme by Domenico Tiepolo
written all together, one after another.
This documented discovery provided experts with the understanding that
Tiepolo Jr. had created those three modellis in 1773-1775 as the series.
 |
| Domenico Tiepolo. The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy.
1773-1775. Oil on canvas. 38,8 x 66, 7 cm. The National Gallery, London. inv.
3319. With kind permission of the organisers of the Tiepolo: Venice in the
North exhibition, Helsinki, 2020-2021. |
At the auction, two of the works were bought most likely by the
well-known British painter George Dawe who resided at the time
in St Petersburg and who was commissioned to create as many as over 300
portraits of the Russian generals and top military personnel, the winners in
the counter-Napoleon campaign, for special and quite imposing gallery in the
Winter Palace known as the Military Gallery.
These two parts of the series went with Mr Dawe straight to Britain, and after
his death in the 1830s, they were at different estates in Britain. In 1918, the
two gorgeous works were acquired by the National Gallery to which collection
they belong ever since.
The third work – the part which entered such incredible
adventures – was bought, most likely at the same auction, by one of the noble
Russian families. Noted by the Sinebrychoff Museum experts, there is a special
stamp on the back-side of the frame of the work which was a typical way to mark
such acquisitions. The experts believe that the work was in the collection of
that noble family, most likely, in St Petersburg, for a century, from 1817
through 1917 or so.
After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and followed total
nationalisation of private art collections and private property in general, the
work was sent to the Hermitage collection, where from it was forcibly extracted
by the Soviet authorities alongside many extraordinary treasures in 1929 to be
sold to Mario d’Atri in Paris in 1930.
 |
| Inna Rogatchi (C). History Shadows. Paris I. Fine art
photography. Extra limited edition. 1/10. Special authored print. 50 x 40 cm.
2021. |
Tellingly, d’Atri knowing precisely that the work was by
Domenico Tiepolo and was done in 1773-1775, has altered both the work’s
authorship and date when he was frantically trying to sell it in the midst of
the war. There is documented evidence of
him trying to sell the work as authored by ‘Giambattista Tiepolo’, the father,
and attributed as created ‘in the XVII century’. This bold fake tells about the
character of a doggy dealer.
He tried to contact the UK National Gallery, the most natural
potential buyer for the missing part of the Troyan Horse series in the midst of
the war, via intermediaries. But the British ignored his offer, still keeping
the documentation with this regard in their archive. We owe that telling piece
of the puzzle to Dr Ira Westergard and Kersti Tainio’s excellent research.
The Legacy of Loot: Crimes Without Punishment.
1942 – 1947, Paris-Berlin: the mystery of Domenico Tiepolo
masterpiece’s key-time location is still
unsolved
In a serious break-through of their research, the art historians
from the Sinebrychoff Art Museum – Finnish National Gallery were able to
examine the work by the newest infra-red equipment recently. They saw there the
detail of crucial importance – number 1942 very well seen under the infra-red
examination but completely unseen by a regular eye. That fact has provided the
experts with the ground for establishing the fact that Mario d’Atri has sold
Tiepolo’s The Greeks Sacking Troy artwork in 1942. Previously, it was
established that well-seen on the frame (19)38 figure marks the time when the
work travelled to Chicago for the exhibition. It is a known habit of art
dealers to mark the dates of the works in their possession while shipping or
changing hands.
This ‘1942’ mark seen in infra-red most likely solves the issue
with potential Jewish ownership of the work, according to all experts with whom
I have discussed the matter.
But it keeps opened the key-question in that almost a
century-old, from 1930 onward, drama around a single art-piece: where has it
been in the period between 1942, after Mario d’Atri sold it to some of the
Germans, and 1947 when it has been
registered by Herbert Ulrich in his inventory, with changed description of the
author to ‘an anonymous’ and tearing off the top of the note on the painting’s back with the name of the painter
there?
Who had bought the work from d’Atri in 1942? The more I am
looking into this amazing story, the more I am interested in that crucial
moment.
In my view, after serious research has been undertaken, out of
the circle of possible buyers, two of them look more potential than the others.
On both of them, there are extensive reports prepared by the OSS ALIU,
dedicated to them personally, separately, among just a dozen of this kind of
personal reports produced by the OSS operatives on the selected major suspects.
Those suspects were regarded as the most important ones to come with these
reports, initially thought to be the background material for possible prosecution.
Some of it had been used during the Nuremberg trial.
One possible person to have the Domenico Tiepolo’s modello from
d’Atri would be notorious Austrian Nazi
art looter Kajetan Muhlmann. The report on him was prepared by the OSS
ALIU intelligence unit as number 8 out of 15 personal reports. Three of the
prepared reports, including the report on Muhlmann, were not published, and
there is a good reason to investigate in detail why. Still, the material of the
report does exist.
Not only Dr Kajetan Muhlmann whose role in plotting the
Anschluss from inside was major, benefited hugely being the first appointed
Minister for Fine Arts in the post-Anschluss Austria, and having the leading
role in total confiscation of art from Jews and anti-Nazi nobility – as Prince
Schwarzenberg family was. Later on, he was appointed by Göering personally to
be in charge with virtual looting of entire Poland, and later on, entire
Holland where richness of art treasures required the establishing of a special
Muhlmann Agency – of the loot, of course .
That person was in the position in the Third Reich that had
allowed him to dispute with Hitler over the Hitler’s manner to travel with some
of the looted Durer’s originals of which Adolf was fancy, insisting that it is
his, Muhlmann’s ultimate responsibility over the safety of the looted art
treasures, and that he was objecting
herr fuhrer’s self-indulgent way of endangering the art treasures. Hitler never liked the man.
It is established by the OSS documents that d’Atri has dealt
with Muhlmann. Additionally to that, my
attention was attracted to the fact that Muhlmann and d’Atri both knew and
dealt with and via Gottlieb Reber, active and authorised by the Nazis German art
dealer who during the war lived and operated in between Switzerland, France and
Italy, and whose special mission was to organise buying for nothing and looting
art from Italy to the Nazi Reich. I decided to have a closer look into Reber’s
connections and activities.
Reber was also a close working contact of d’Atri and might help
him to reroute illegal under the French law dealings with the Soviet
representatives in the early 1930s.
My attention was alerted by two things: during the war, Gottlieb
Reber was on a special mission from the Reich to bring there Italian art
treasures, so the work by Tiepolo-son would be very much in the centre of his
interest, and he was the perfect person to stash the work with, as Muhlmann was
doing with he works which were left in his possession. It was established by
the OSS investigators that in the post-war chaos, Muhlmann succeeded to hide
quite many of the looted art treasures that he appropriated in a typical
gangster way, and then he was gradually selling them via trusted dealers to
live on, to sustain himself and many of his girl-friends, including another
Hitler’s hysterical but calculative acolyte Leni
Riefenstahl. The system worked perfectly well for Muhlmann and his harem
for several years, well into the 1950s.
 |
| Inna Rogatchi(C). Insomnia. Homage to Primo Levi. Watercolour,
wax pastel, oil pastel, encre a l’alcool, perle de jaune on authored original
archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2010-2016-2020. |
However, there is another person among that despicable bunch of
the Nazi art looters whom I tend to think about as the most plausible buyer of
The Greeks Sacking Troy from Mario d’Atri in 1942 in Paris. I have researched
this aspect in detail.
Maria-Almas Dietrich was both an exceptional and typical character in the mixed
realities of the Third Reich. We know
about her because of the detailed material gathered by the OSS and aimed for
their special report dedicated to her exclusively. That report was numbered as
13th among 15 prepared personal reports. In her case, similarly to the case of
the report on Muhlmann, it was not published, but the materials of it do exist.
The importance of Dietrich is illustrated by the fact that among
2000 personalities collected by the ALIU investigators as being actively
involved in the Nazi looting of art, only fifteen of them were selected as the
important subjects to complete an individual reports about.
That woman without proper art education managed to compensate
for the luck of it by her connections. She who owned a rather unremarkable
small antique shop in Munich has had a close relationship with Eva Braun and
has managed to get as close to Hitler personally, as one can.
She also has had a long liaison with Heinrich Hoffmann,
official photographer and close personal friend of Hitler whom Hitler trusted
personally so much that he did appoint him, the person without art education,
to supervise the Reich art policy from its beginning in the mid-1930s. From
that time on, Hoffmann’s role in the
Nazi mass art looting was huge. It was Hoffmann who introduced his acquaintance Dietrich to his boss Hitler
in 1936.
As it often happened in the case of the individuals around
Hitler, personal chemistry was a defining factor in many otherwise irrational arrangements that he has
maintained. When Hitler started to become an art collector, it was Dietrich who was shuttling between
Munich and Berlin proposing the first subjects for his private collection to
him. She tried hard and was always at hand.
It is important to understand the personal and psychological
background of the monsters-in-action, otherwise humanity always would foolishly
repeat its own mistakes. Hitler felt psychologically comfortable with both
Hoffmann and Dietrich. To a certain degree,
it was because of the deficiency of their all’ proper art education, and
the general education, too, for that matter. He felt at home with people like
that, and with two those individuals, in particular. His trust in loyal them
originated in this psychological comfortability, born out of evenness of under-educated minds. And
corresponding art tastes, not the least.
Unlike many of my historians and writers colleagues, I never was
surprised by the most known Hitler’s phrase regarding art, with what he has
stamped the pride of human genius blatantly: “ I will not tolerate unfinished art!” As pathetic as it is, he meant it. Because he
was a willing beginner, but never an artist at all. In fact, regarding his art
abilities, he was a very limited copyist, at best. The same as press
photographer Hoffmann was not a fine photographer at any stage, and the same as
specialising in repaired Turkish rugs Dietrich was not an expert in antiques
and art whatsoever.
Later on, Dietrich was authorised to buy the looted art for
Hitler directly, being the only person who was permitted to act on her own,
without otherwise mandatory approval of any purchase by either the director of
the planned Linz Art Museum Hans Posse or Martin Bormann. She was also the person
who managed to sell the highest number of artworks to the Hitler personal art
collection.
The art looting by the
Nazis was such a vast operation that it has to be compartmentalised, with
implementing a rather inflexible system
of vetoing. There was the art looted for Hitler personal art collection,
the art looted massively for his dreamed Linz Art Museum, the art looted for
Göering personal art collection, the art looted for the Reich art depositary,
and so on. All these destinations of looting, so to say, were conducted
distinctively separately, with special funding for each of them.
In the Nazi war against culture, all designated looted art
middlemen had to provide their proposals to the certain Nazi officials in
charge of vetoing the process which was conducted through fixed and inflexible
machinery. The process was conducted on each of the directions, for each of the
collections. In the case of Hitler, his personal art collection soon
enough was run closely in parallel with
his maniac project for the Linz Art Museum, the designated officials for
approval of any object were Posse and Bormann. For all the others, including
educated gangster Dr Muhlmann, except a close fuhrer’s trustee, uneducated frau
Dietrich.
Enjoying a special favour of the fuhrer, Dietrich also has had
easily accessible funds for her frenetic shopping sprees. Being far from an expert, she bought art
based on her own taste and understanding of an owner of a second-class antique
shop in Munich.
When Nazis occupied France and celebrated their unbelievable
luck of being the feared masters of Paris, for many of them just this thought
alone was having a champagne-like effect psychologically. It is known that
Dietrich was enjoying herself in Paris overwhelmingly, with all her Bavarian
crudity. She just could not have enough of it, and has become the talk of the
town in no time.
Dietrich was shuttling between Germany and Paris non-stop, and
lived there in a vulgar way of a self-appointed bossy celebrity overwhelmed by
power and champagne. She also did run
through the art galleries in Paris regularly, emptying them efficiently.
Two moments registered in the OSS documents regarding Dietrich
got my special attention: in Paris, most frequently she visited the galleries
located on rue la Boetie. And she bought quite many modelli, oil sketches on canvas, which Tiepolo’s work in question
was in its technique, – for the same reasons that they were
popular from the time of Tiepolo and
thereafter – easy to transport,
of a manageable size, and still commanding high prices being original artworks
executed in oil on canvas and by old masters.
 |
| The map of Paris prepared for the Nazi Germany troops before the
invasion. Commons Images Library. |
Another important consideration is that it is also quite
plausible that d’Atri was able ‘to feed’
his false attribution of the work, with its switched authorship and date, to
that under-educated art shopaholic much easier than to his other Nazi clients.
Of many of those Germans who were hunting the art treasures in Paris and were
more professional and better educated, Maria-Alma Dietrich was the type who would
not know the difference neither between father and son Tiepolo’s manners, or
between the distinctions of XVII and XVIII centuries in nuances of Venetian art
.
So, in theory, she could be easily deceived by d’Atri, bought
The Greeks Sacking Troy from him and brought it to Berlin in 1942. Hitler might
be not that impressed by rather dark work which needed a restoration, thus
leaving frau Dietrich with the work in her hands before she passed it to
Heinrich Ulrich, selling it to him or leaving it with him on commission for
possible sale. Ulrich’s imposing gallery was in Berlin at least until 1944 when
it was bombed, and was located just around the corner, eight minutes walk, from
the Hitler’s Chancellery where Dietrich was a regular visitor.
Analysing all pro and
contra-s of the case, given the kind of art that has been in the possession of
Muhlmann, and his professional awareness of periods and masters, I tend to
think that in 1942 in the occupied Paris, it might be that it was rather
uneducated and sporadic frau Dietrich whom d’Atri could fool over The Greeks
Sacking Troy work’s date and its author, it well may be her who was frequent at his gallery at 23, rue Boetie,
and who bought modelli regularly. My bet is on Dietrich as a likely Nazi buyer
of the Tiepolo’s work from d’Atri in Paris in 1942.
According to my line of thinking, when Ulrich resumed his
business as early as in 1946, he was in need to clear his stock from
problematic pieces. Authored by Tiepolo-son modello previously from the
Hermitage collection, importantly, – about which Ulrich must knew due to the
popularity of the German Pantheon magazine, it was a must reading among
professionals – the work that he
possibly got from nobody else but the personal provider of looted art to
Hitler, was undoubtedly a very undesirable asset to own under the
circumstances.
The savvy German dealer active during a war-time sacrificed the
work’s ownership, physically too, tearing the top of the note on the back of
the frame off, and sent the work to Finland, where it was left unrecognised on
a private wall for 48 years.
Who would expect that a half of a century later, in a distant
Finland, 30-something Kai Kartio would possess a required intuition,
professional curiosity, and expert approach to know where to check on the provenance
of a dark obscure work? And it is highly important that we know so much
about the extraordinary history of the Tiepolo work at the Sinebrychoff Museum
collection today. With this kind of public knowledge on this kind of public
crime, there are no statute of limitations.
Germany, Austria, 1945-1950s: crimes without punishment.
When I am researching in detail the situation after the war,
with that unbelievable success of so many of the Nazis and their collaborators
in escaping the punishment, I inevitably come to that powerfully distorted
balance of good and evil. In that outcome, good was shrank terribly and evil
was laughing big. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich. Namely, after that
defeat.
The OSS special unit on the Nazi looted art ALIU was working literally round o’clock for three
years, preparing the documentation for possible prosecution of the main Nazi
officials who were tasked with the cultural war of an unprecedented scale. How
many of them have been prosecuted? None. All of them were briefly detained,
questioned, interrogated, and released. All of them were living the years after
the war out of the stashes of the looted art that was left in their possession,
with most recognisable artworks being hidden and dispersed among their trusted
accomplices mainly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and some of it in Spain.
Göering’s personal art provider Hofer, despite being convicted
by the French military court in absentia to ten years of imprisonment, never
spent a day behind the bars. Instead, he was
nicely and profitably keeping his art dealership business in Munich until
his death in 1971. He did not even need
to bother to try the rat-line to escape to Latin America, as many of his Nazi
colleagues did. You see, Munich seemed
to be too far from the French border, in the eyes of the post-war French
authorities, in a giant distance of 350 km.
France also did not look into the dealings of the one of the
most close to the Nazis dealers Mario d’Atri, who was never charged with
anything and who is believed to sell his business, its Parisian part, at his pleasure in the 1960s. There are some
indications that d’Atri was benefiting from his Italian citizenship and
retreated there during the hot first period after the end of war, but then was
able to maintain his business as he pleased well into the 1960s.
D’Atri’s major client Marie-Almas Dietrich was similarly happily
running her antique store in Munich as well, until her death at the same year
as Hofer’s, 1971, with her daughter – who was that special connection of
Dietrich to Eva Braun – continuing the
family business thereafter. They did it as practically all the families of the
notorious Nazi art looters, middlemen and dealers did. The point here is that
they all were allowed to do it.
In a jaw-dropping
arrogance, Dietrich’s antique shop at Odeonplatz in Munich, that has become an
art gallery of course, has been promoted by the art organisations and
professional media in Germany as ‘the one of the leading art galleries in
Munich’ in the 1970s, alongside with similar establishments owned by many of
Dietrich’s pals and some rivals from their happy Nazi days.
Dietrich’s patron who introduced her to Hitler, the close friend
of the fuhrer, member of the NDSA number
59 from its earliest days in 1920, and a
major figure in the Nazi art looting process, Heinrich Hoffmann was sentenced
by the Allies to the devastating punishment of four years of imprisonment –
after which, in 1956, he did manage to
return to himself and his family ‘his’ personal art collection by the decision
of the Bavarian Financial Ministry. Hoffmann collection was not only known to
be assembled of the looted art. It has been put into scrupulous inventory by
the OSS ALIU officers in its entirety in preparation of its planned
confiscation. That closest Hitler associate has been officially designated by
the Allies as ‘major offender’ regarding
the Nazi art looting process. That designation had a legal meaning as well –
implication for complete confiscation of his art looted collection.
But Hoffmann, as many other senior Nazis, had an arrogance – and
possibilities, importantly – to fight for his rights in astonishing defiance.
They all did it because they were provided with many possibilities – legal,
human, social – in the realities of post-war Germany to be allowed to do that,
successfully.
The decision of the Bavarian authorities came two years after
Hoffmann was released from his terrible four-years imprisonment, in 1956. The
most charming moment there is the disarming phrasing of the decision: “the all art objects (belonging to Hoffmann)
under administration of the Bavarian State Paintings Collections to be turned
over to Mr. Heinrich Hoffmann, Nazi Party photographer.” ( as cited in the Steffen Winter’s article on the topic in
Der Spiegel magazine back in 2013). What is yet more charming is the fact that
in black on white, the decision has been referred to as being conducted ‘in the
process of (Hoffmann’s) denazification’.
The one of the most serious criminals of the Third Reich,
Kajetan Muhlmann who was ranked Nazi officer, also died there in Munich in 1958
of natural causes escaping prosecution in a mind-blowing defiance of any
remnant of any norms of civility of the German and international post-war establishment.
This is despite him being tried in absentia by both Poland and Austria, and
despite all active efforts by the both countries for his extradition, from also
oh-so-very far from Vienna, South Bavaria. The escape of the punishment by
Muhlmann in particular is qualified by leading art historians as ‘unbelievable failure of justice’ (
prof. John Petropoulus, 2016).
It is telling to see this screaming phenomenon by the inner look
of the decent German journalist: “No one likes to talk about this enormous
cache of Nazi treasure, partly because of a feeling of guilt for possessing
assets that are often of unclear provenance: Art objects acquired from Jewish
collections that were sold off in a panic after 1933, or that were simply taken
from their rightful owners before they disappeared into concentration camps”
– Steffen
Werner wrote in his “A Nazi Legacy Hidden in German Museums”
investigative report – no, not in 1956, but in 2013.
 |
| Inna Rogatchi (C). Holocaust Travelling I. History Shadows
series. Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, encre l’alcool,
crayons Luminance on authored original archival print on cotton paper. 70 x 70
cm. 2019. |
Helsinki & London,
2020-2021: reflections of the united triptych
Coming back to the word of art, the unification of all the parts
of Domenico Tiepolo’s series on Trojan Horse that has happened at the Tiepolo
exhibition in Helsinki in the autumn 2020-winter 2021 at the Sinebrychoff Art
Museum does look different in the light of the restored saga of believed to be
lost part of the series. To make it happen, it really needed so many factors to
coincide: resurfaced work 25 years ago, its identification and re-discovery,
ideas and possibilities of exhibiting all three parts together, multiplied
circumstances related not only to the two main cultural institutions in question, the UK National Gallery in
London and the Finnish National Gallery, but also to plans and activities of
several more leading and very busy international museums in Italy, Russia,
Sweden and Denmark.
 |
| Domenico Tiepolo. Three-part series on the theme of the Trojan
Horse. 1773-1775. Shown together in public for the first time in 203 years at
the Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition in Helsinki, Sinebrychoff Art
Museum. With kind permission of the Museum. Photo: Hannu Pakarinen. |
It needed that essentially important research of the work’s
provenance – and when one embarks on the journey of this sort, it is extremely
time consuming, especially if the case is the work which is 245-years-old. It
also depends on resources, the will of your counterparts all over the world,
existing – or not – documentation, and , very importantly, luck. And the most
importantly, I would add inspiration and a team spirit to that. There are few
natural forces in this world which are comparable with the drive of inspired
art historians, take it from me.
From this perspective, perhaps, it is not that surprising that
the way of the Tiepolo’s re-discovered piece in Helsinki took almost 25 years
to be united at the exhibition with the other two parts from the same series.
It was a dizzy feeling to look on those works all together, in the way in which
they were conceived by Domenico Tiepolo in Venice back in 1773-1775.
The staggering fact of the display in Helsinki in 2020-2021 is
that it was the very first museum exposition of the series since Domenico Tiepolo created it 245 years ago. It
is known that the three modelli were
shown to various patrons of arts, privately, at the time. It is also known that
the only public demonstration of the modelli together had occurred 42 years
after the series creation, in St Petersburg, at that famous public auction of
the Niccolo Leonelli’s possessions in 1817 conducted after his death. The
series were demonstrated to the public during the day of auction sales then.
For the following 203 years, the three parts of the series were
never shown to the public again. Until the exhibition Tiepolo: Venice in the
North at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki.
In the mirror of 245-year old
artwork
The art curator who re-discovered the Domenico Tiepolo’s
masterpiece in Helsinki in 1996, Kai Kartio has told me recently: “Ever since the moment when I knew for sure
what the work was, and what it went through during all those years in the past
century, since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia onward, I was thinking so
very often that the case is incredible from the point of view of how the one
not large work of art has reflected the tragedy of the whole century, and what a tragic century that was”.
Similar thoughts and reflections are shared by everyone among my
colleagues art historians in Finland, Italy, Great Britain, Russia, Germany,
Austria, France, and the United States who were involved in tracing the destiny
of this work at different times and in different contexts of their works.
 |
| Inna Rogatchi (C). History Pages XII. History Pages series.
Watercolour, wax pastel, oil pastel, lapice pastel, crayons Luminance, encre
l’alcool, Chinese red paste, perle le blanc, perle d’or on authored original
archival print on cotton paper. 50 x 70 cm. 2012-2020. |
We all came out of this enriching and rewarding experience with
the prevailing thought on how tightly our history is connected to art. How
unexpectedly it could turn, how closely it does reflect. There is one thing to
know about it in theory, and it is quite
another phenomenon to experience it in real life, step by step, putting
together a complicated puzzle piece by piece, in what I call art historical
detective, or cultural investigation, in practice. What can be more convincing
than reconstructed history in faces and destinies? When the art is in question,
there is nothing more real than the reflections in its mirror.
Both Domenico’s father Giambattista Tiepolo, his brother Lorenzo
and himself were quite a travellers, unusually for the time they lived and
created in. I was wondering what they would think of the adventures of the
Domenico’s mid-size modelli which has encapsulated not only much of the history
well beyond the time when it was
created, but most importantly, the pain and drama of it.
 |
| Tiepolo: Venice in the North exhibition at the Sinebrychoff Art
Museum – Finnish National Gallery. Helsinki. 2020-2021. Photo Hannu Pakarinen.
With kind permission of the Museum. |
The three parts of the original series on Trojan Horse created
in Venice in 1775 had been reunited after more than 200 years in our days, in
an elegant way. But it was so much more in this unexpected story.
This Venetian modello depicting
the Trojan Horse in the flamboyance and superb craft of Italian masters, has
become a witness of unspeakable horrors and tragedies of a totally different
period of time. Our newly obtained
knowledge on that has come thanks to the
work of the group of dedicated art historians. Their efforts and our perception
of it has made this mid-sized Venetian artwork a bearer of our awakened
conscience. Not a small achievement at
all.
© November 2020 – April 2021.
