Leda and the Swan

In April 1942, in the art market of occupied Paris, the dealer Allen Loebl sold this canvas to Karl Haberstock, one of the main buyers for the museum Hitler planned for Linz, the Austrian city of his boyhood. By February 1943 it belonged to that museum, which was never built. The painting sat out the end of the war with the rest of the Linz hoard in the Alps, reached the Allied collecting point in Munich in July 1945, and was sent back to France the following year. The Louvre catalogues it as attributed to Veronese, while the museum in Ajaccio calls it the work of Veronese and his workshop. The subject comes from Ovid: Jupiter, disguised as a swan, reaching Leda, the wife of the king of Sparta. Since 1951 it has hung in Ajaccio on deposit from the Louvre, still listed among the works recovered after the war whose rightful owners have not been found.