It’s called a masterpiece. However, this painting representing a Madonna and Child hung, not in a museum, but in the bedroom of a lady who has been living away from home for a year, in a retirement home in England. Her grandchildren placed her because Alzheimer’s disease gradually deprived her of all autonomy.
At 90, a widow, she could no longer live alone, and especially no longer live without medical assistance. So she left, abandoning her home and her painting. Except that after a year, the difficulties began to accumulate for the family, the medical costs turned out to be higher and higher. Decision was made, then, to sell the house and the furniture that goes with it.
Recent media attention has been extraordinary surrounding our sale of a Renaissance painting, thought to have been lost.
Learn more:https://t.co/We8faJpHK8 pic.twitter.com/0AhXHPKMHD
—Dawsons Auctioneers (@DawsonsAuctions) June 13, 2022
An expert came, at first sight, in the entrance, the living room, the kitchen. She only noticed trinkets. And then, she entered the room: the painting took her “seizure“, as she recounts in a review for the Dawsons auction house. Hanging above the headboard, an Italian Renaissance oil on canvas, a Madonna with particularly delicate features holding in her arms a child surrounded of angels. A masterpiece, therefore, immediately appraised. Verdict: it is indeed a 16th century painting, painted by Filippino Lippi, a pupil of the master Sandro Botticelli, and author of classified frescoes, in particular in a villa of the Medici and another in a chapel in Rome.
The painting belonged to his father, who himself inherited it from his ancestors, and who took it with him when he left his native Italy to emigrate to England at the beginning of the last century. The lady inherited it, without making much of it, and placed it in her bedroom to fall asleep under the watchful eye of the angels and still have a bit of her father with her in the most personal room of her house.
At auction, at Dawsons in London, the painting exceeded all forecasts and was sold for 300,000 euros. A sum that the family of this lady will therefore use to offer her the best possible medical care, a personal nurse and, of course, a room of her own. Something to give another meaning, another mission to this painting, which for her was certainly priceless.