Goering's dealers and collectors in Italy

Any provenance work pertaining to works and objects of art entering or leaving Italy during and after the Nazi era must cast a pall of suspicion on the following individuals who traded occasionally or frequently with Hermann Goering through two of his principal agents, Walther Hofer and Josef Angerer. Joseph Angerer, who swept through French Jewish collections in Paris during the summer of 1940 on Goering’s account, also acquired works in Rome while he stayed at the Hotel Excelsior there. Some items—tapestries mostly—were purchased from American or British owners living in Rome at the time. Angerer was also well acquainted in Florence with Contini and Bellini, and befriended Grassi there. He knew the city of Milan like the back of his hand.

The bulk of this information stems from detailed postwar interrogations and debriefings of Walther Hofer.

Florence:

• Luigi Bellini
• Conte Contini--Sometimes, Contini dealt with Goering through Reber, one of Hofer’s oldest friends who lived in Switzerland, using the Rome-based shipping company, Martelli and Rosoni.
• Giulio Grassi
• Commandantore Ventura
• Dr. Victor Wallerstein

Genoa:

• Eldebaudo Bossi--Bossi also dealt with Jacques Dubourg, a Paris dealer who was very busy during the Vichy years. Dubourg served as a go-between for Hofer for sales to Goering.

Milan:

• Ferruccia Asta

Rome:

• Alfredo Barsauli
• Ugo Fandola
• Dr. Alessandro Morandotti
• Galleria Sangiorgi
• Galleria Simonetti
• Graf Alessandro Tatistscheff
• Contessa Lina Traine
• Fr. Irene von Benda
• Fraulein Staeger
• Dr. Ettore Sestieri, art historian, director of Galleria Barberini.
• Brasini

Venice:

• Albert Maier

In search of a triptych “Purificato Mariae” by Marco d’Oggione

In early January 2011, the heiress to a Dutch family who currently lives in Venezuela asked for assistance in finding a painting stolen during the German occupation of Holland from her father’s home in Doorwerth. The painting is a triptych signed by Marco d’Oggione, and produced around 1470 for a wealthy Lombard family. d’Oggione had studied under Leonardo da Vinci.

Her father, Theodoor Hermann Driessen, had purchased the d'Oggione from Galleria Voltare in Florence, Italy, in May 1929. Mario Salmi, then Director of the Uffizi in Florence, had provided a certificate of authenticity for the work.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Driessen owned a chocolate factory operating under the brand “Driessen” in Rotterdam. The family house—“Jagerhuis”—in Doorwerth, near Arnhem, was filled with art treasures and other valuables, which her father had laboriously collected over many decades.

On October 2, 1944, German troops loaded up all of the Driessen family belongings onto trucks and shepherded them eastward towards the Reich, never to be seen again. The Driessen family fled westward to safety to a nearby village with the little that they had been able to salvage from their house and hid in a cellar with dozens of other refugees.

The following day, on October 3, the “Jagerhuis” was pulverized by phosphorus bombs.

After the war, Theodoor Driessen filed a number of claims, in vain, to recover his property.

"Purificato Mariae" by Marco d'Oggione, ca. 1470, 280 x 160 cm
Source: Bundesarchiv via ERR Project

Should anyone have any information about the d’Oggione, drop us a line. There’s a family waiting to recover it.