Madonna of the Veil

In the autumn of 1943 the Naples museum pictures, stored for safety at the abbey of Montecassino, were driven north by the German Hermann Göring Division to a depot near Spoleto. There its officers opened six crates and lifted out a handful of paintings as a present for Göring. This one came out of crate number 57. It is painted in oil on a slab of slate, and in 1568 Vasari had already noted a Madonna covering the child with a cloth in the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a record linked to this very picture.

Mary bends over her son, who sleeps naked along the bottom edge, head on his crossed arms, mouth open. With two fingers of her right hand she holds a veil so thin that it shows only as a faint pale triangle. Grey-haired Joseph peers out from behind that hand, and an angel is almost lost in the dark at the right.

After the war the painting was found in the Altaussee salt mine in Austria. Rodolfo Siviero, the Italian official who led the recovery of works taken from Italy, wrote that it caused them more anguish than anything else, because the Madonna's face had disappeared under oxidation. In August 1947, on the way home, two restorers from Florence named Lo Vullo and Sokolov removed that clouded crust in Bolzano.