Un’«opera nobile del Cairo» dimenticata

A deeper look into documents and materials kept in various archives allows for the retracing of the origin and history of artworks formerly in the Capuchin monastery in Sondrio (Valtellina, Lombardy). Some of these works are well known paintings, others were believed to be missing. Thanks to documentary evidence we can trace the origin of the most valuable paintings once held in the monastery. To give an example, we have been able to fill a gap in the early history of the Assumption of the Virgin which primary sources believed to be painted by Francesco Cairo. The painting had been kept in the Capuchin monastery until the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1937 someone had the work roughly repainted and moved to the church of Santi Gervaso and Protasio in Sondrio. These formerly unknown traumatic events comprised an important gap in the history of the workofart. This research made It possible to rebuild these events, confirm the attribution of the Assumption to Cairo, and to verify the means by which the painting moved following the suppression of ecclesiastical orders and subversive laws between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.