“The oil painting, Count Ugolino, had been lifted from a gallery in Turin, northern Italy, in December 2001.
Goya’s work – which evokes a gory episode from Dante’s Inferno – was retrieved during a raid on a flat near the Montenegrin capital of Pogdorica.
Two brothers were detained. The painting had been insured for £277,000 after being bought for £140 in 1999.
At the time, it was bought as an anonymous work, but experts later attributed it to Goya.
The work – which is roughly as large as an A4 sheet – refers to one of the most shocking tales from medieval Italy.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante told the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who, according to his story, ended up eating the flesh of his children after all the male members of the family were starved to death by Ugolino’s enemies. —BBC News, June 15, 2005
Contributed by Susan Wegner
Sarah Symmons, “John Flaxman and Francisco Goya: Infernos Transcribed”
Dante Cigar Label (Circa 1900)
“Numerous articles have stated that this label originally cost about $6,000 to produce (in turn of the Century dollars) and that it would have required some 22 separate limestones to register and complete the label – but no one that I am aware of has been able to prove that there are 22 colors.
Nevertheless this version of ‘Dante’ is an exquisite piece of art and considered a cross-over label – that is why there are so few available today. Many non-cigar label collectors acquired this label when it was first found – such as interior decorators, antique dealers and framers. According to Mark Trout, who located the label in 1977 at the Lewis Walters Cigar Box Company in New York, there were 1,200 found. . . The price Mark originally sold the label for: $7.00 – currently it is going for $500.00 to $800.00.” […] —Cigar Label Junkie
Contributed by Richard Abrams
Dante and Swan
Contributed by Richard Abrams
Verbi Italiani
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