Indiana University will return looted painting

Indiana University says President Michael McRobbie and other university representatives will travel to Germany for a ceremony Monday to return the painting to the Jagdschloss Grunewald, a royal hunting lodge on the outskirts of Berlin.


Indiana University will return the painting depicting the flagellation of Christ to the Berlin palace where it disappeared in 1945. 

More than 60 years after it disappeared from a Berlin museum in the chaotic aftermath of World War II. The Art Museum of  Indiana University acquired the painting in 1985 as a gift from former  President Herman B Wells. Indiana University officials said Thursday that Wells purchased the work in good faith from a London art gallery in 1967.


The painting created by a Cologne master, the Flagellation of Christ dates to the late 15th century and originally formed part of a wing of an altarpiece.


Indiana University says the oil-on-oak painting  was one of more than a dozen paintings looted from the Berlin museum by Russian and British soldiers during the summer of 1945.

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