In 1989, Madonna purchased a painting of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, looking with yearning at Endymion, the handsome, mythological shepherd, reports The Times.
The work has been described as a representation of female sexual desire. However, it is also a symbol of the mysterious ways of the art world, at least as far as some French experts are concerned.
They believe Madonna’s painting, for which she paid $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, could be a masterpiece that went missing in Amiens in northern France when the city was attacked by Germany in 1918.
Amiens’s mayor is pleading with the American pop star to lend the work to the city, hoping to boost its chances of being named European capital of culture in 2028.
Diane et Endymion by Jérôme-Martin Langlois, the 19th-century neoclassical painter, was long presumed to have been destroyed in the bombing of Amiens’s fine art museum eight months before the end of the First World War.
However, no one knew for sure. When Jacques Foucart, a distinguished curator at the Louvre, inquired into the whereabouts of the painting in the 1970s, he could find no written trace of it after 1911. It might have been blown up by the Germans, or it might have been removed from the museum long beforehand and sold on the black market, he concluded.
Foucart left matters there, which is where the mystery rested until an art expert from Amiens chanced upon a report on Madonna in Paris Match, the glossy magazine, in 2015. Behind the singer on the stairs of her home on the other side of the Atlantic was what looked like Langlois’s missing masterpiece.