Renaissance Altarpieces Hidden Behind the Door

Everyone dreams of it: Sneaking away from a tag sale with an undiscovered Rembrandt. Digging something out of your attic that is valuable enough to pay off your mortgage.

Well folks, keep on dreaming because it does happen.

Jean Preston, an elderly librarian of modest means living in Oxford, U.K., had found a pair of tiny (15 x 5 inches) panel paintings in a box of miscellaneous objects brought into a California museum where she worked in the 1960s. Intrigued by their beauty, but with no knowledge of their history or worth, she encouraged her father, an amateur collector, to purchase them for a small amount. Last year, after he died, Miss Preston hired an expert to examine a group of paintings he had bequeathed to her.

Michael Liversidge, a former dean and head of art history at Bristol University, was that expert. He reported being immediately drawn to a pair of small poplar wood panels, which he believed to be 15th-century Tuscan works …. an interesting enough find for an old lady’s guest room.

Upon doing some research, however, he was amazed to discover that they were the missing panels from the San Marco altarpiece in Florence, painted by the Renaissance master Fra Angelico at the height of his career, and commissioned by none other than Cosimo de’ Medici c.1440. Although the main panel, showing the Madonna and child, still hangs at San Marco, the eight smaller paintings depicting the saints (likely positioned in two rows of four on either side of the central image), were dispersed during the Napoleonic wars. Six of the eight had been accounted for, located in private collections and galleries throughout the world. But two, as it turned out, had been hanging anonymously behind the door of Jean Preston’s spare room in her modest Oxford home.

An expert on Medieval texts, Preston was fascinated by this discovery, but not interested in their monetary potential. She neglected to share her find with the rest of the world and it wasn’t until this year, when she passed away at the age of 77, that family members called in the appraisers.

The consensus? The pictures are valued together at more than one million pounds. They go up for sale later this year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Barn, Basement and Attic Finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.