The mayor of Amiens ( French city) has approached Madonna about borrowing a picture that went missing a century ago.
A century ago, the painting "Diana and Endymion" vanished from the Musée de Picardie, and Brigitte Fouré sent a video message to the American actress on Facebook inviting her to "lend" the picture.
The mayor of Amiens, Brigitte Fouré, begged Madonna to "lend" her a painting to the Musée de Picardie on Facebook. The picture may have been stolen.
Amiens is willing to go head-to-head with Madonna if it means becoming the cultural capital of Europe. The mayor of Amiens, Brigitte Fouré, begged the American singer to "lend her artwork," which the mayor might have purchased at auction in 1989, in a video uploaded to her Facebook page on Monday night, January 16.
As you can see in the video below, the mayor of Amiens started by saying, "Madonna, you probably don't know the city of Amiens." However, in only a few days, a particular link was formed between the singer and her adopted hometown. After these brief pleasantries, the municipal councilor dives right into the heart of the issue, asking, "Can you conceive that we are contenders to be European Capital of Culture in 2028?" Please consider lending your artwork to the people of Amiens in 2028 so that they, too, may appreciate its beauty.
The work in question, by French artist Jérôme-Martin Langlois, is titled Diana and Endymion, and it dates back to 1822. In 1918, it was likely blown up in a bombardment on the Picardy museum. The city councilman explains the discovery in a Facebook post, saying, "A recent article in the newspaper Le Figaro enabled us to discover that the painting deposited before the Great War at the Museum of Fine Arts in Amiens (...) could have been found in the United States in the personal collection of the famous singer Madonna."
The Figaro inquiry states that in 1989, a nearly similar picture "reappeared in New York at an auction in the United States," with the exception that it lacked a date and signature. Madonna bought it for a tidy amount of 1.3 million Euros.
An interesting twist occurred in 2015 when an Amiens curator identified the artwork in a Paris Match article on Madonna. The museum in Picardy filed a theft case against X after the artwork was reported missing. Brigitte Fouré is optimistic that the painting will return to Amiens "for a time" now that she has put out a fresh request
Seen in Huffingtonpost.fr