The curious case of Madonna and the missing Old Master

A city’s bid to be European capital of culture, a forgotten Old Master painting and the Queen of Pop—this is the unlikely scenario after Brigitte Fouré, the mayor of Amiens in France, asked Madonna to lend the city a helping hand.

Reported in the Guardian, Fouré appealed to the Material Girl in a video posted on Facebook to loan a painting in her collection—Diana and Endymion (1822), thought to be by the French artist Jérôme-Martin Langlois—to help boost the city’s bid to be European capital of culture in 2028.

The painting was commissioned by Louis XVIII to hang in the Salon of Diane at the Palace of Versailles but went missing after the First World War. The pop star bought the work at auction in New York in 1989 for $1.3m and it was largely forgotten about until 2015, when an eagle-eyed curator spotted it hanging in Madonna’s home in an article in Paris Match magazine. “Obviously we don’t dispute the legal acquisition you made of this work,” Fouré says in an online video. Over to you Madge.