Drawings stolen by Nazis were just discovered by Italian police
Two drawings by the artist Giacomo Cavedone, Study of a priest holding a book and An examination of the standing figure of a young soldier, has been restored by the Italian authorities, decades after they were looted by the Nazis. Continuous efforts to discover and redistribute works of art looted by the Nazis at the height of their power have yielded fruitful results in recent years, but they have also revealed how much was stolen. The Cavedone cartoons that the Nazis stole from a Jewish lawyer Arthur Feldmann in 1939, a total of 750 drawings were taken. Feldmann’s collection consisted of 16th and 17th century works from a variety of different artists.
The New York Holocaust Claims Processing Office was able to identify one of the Cavedone drawings when it was set up auction online. “The return of this drawing with the help of the Italian government is very symbolic to us,” said Feldmann’s grandson Uri Peled. “Were it not for the Italians, my family would have perished in Auschwitz. Now, 80 years later, it is the Italians who return this work of art to the Feldmann heirs. ”
Italian authorities also recently discovered a painting by Nicolas Poussin that had been looted by its French owners during the Nazi occupation of the country. The painting, Lod with his two daughters who served him a drink, was found in the home of an antiques dealer near Padua. The heirs, who could claim the rightful ownership of the painting, a 98-year-old Swiss woman and a 65-year-old American, had been looking for the painting since 2020. In addition, the Museum of Pontevedra in Spain recently announced that it will return two works of art in its collection that had been looted by the Nazis to Poland. The paintings had originally belonged to the Polish Czartoryski family, who had tried to shield their collection from the Nazis by hiding them behind the walls of a museum to no avail.
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