Word: fesche
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While Napoleon was busy collecting countries, his maternal half uncle, a priest named Joseph Fesch, was busy collecting art. Pulling rank (he soon became a cardinal) Fesch acquired Dutch masters, Italian primitives and renaissance greats. Waterloo meant little to Fesch; he simply moved into the Vatican; but after that he had to rely more on his eye. Once in a junk shop he spied a cupboard with a finely painted door, even though one plank was missing. Later, he found the missing section as part of a stool. Today the picture is on view in the Vatican museum-Leonardo...
...Fesch once guessed that he owned 30,000 art works. He bequeathed 1,000 of them to a "study museum" in Ajaccio. The museum is still too small to show more than a fourth of the collection at a time, and there is no accurate catalogue for the Botticellis, Bellinis and Lorenzo di Credis that vie for wall space. Nevertheless it is, indirectly, the best thing Napoleon ever did for Corsica...
This canvas, valued at a million francs, had been presented to the town of Lyons many years ago by Cardinal Fesch, uncle of Napoleon, and subsequently had disappeared from sight. It was discovered by Mr. Harris and a British associate, Dr. Cornelius Ver Heyden de Lancey, among a pile of old rubbish in a small room in the Military School at Lyons, where it had lain unnoticed for half a century...
...Battle of Fribourg but some entirely different combat, which has yet to be identified. Casanova was a celebrated painter of battle scenes who lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century. The picture in question originally belonged to the Conde family, later passed into the hands of Cardinal Fesch, and finally was given to the Lyons Museum who in turn loaned it to the hospital where it has lain forgotten for several decades...
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