.........JOYFULL AND TRIUMPHANT...................

.............and as a postscript to the last posting , there was a fascinating programme on over Christmas on Fra Fillipo Lippi's painting ' The Madonna In The Woods ' , a nativity scene now hanging in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin.

Originally painted for the private chapel of Cosimo di Medici within the Palazzo di Medici in Florence   (mentioned in the last posting as the original home of Ucello's triptych ) , the painting is most unusual insofar as the setting is not that of the traditional stable / manger , but puts the Madonna and Child within a dark forest, overseen by the Holy Trinity of The Father , The Son and The Holy Ghost .  Having survived in its original location for some three hundred years or so , it was bought - quite legitimately - by a Prussian wood trader and ended up in Berlin , a most apposite location given that the physche , the folk memory of the German people is most firmly located within the forests of Northern Europe ( Goring going so far as to re-invent himself in the style of a traditional German land-owner / hunter in leiderhosen and feathered hunting hat ) . Venerated by the Nazis and hidden away for the duration of the war ,the painting was appropriated  - arguably illegitimately - by the U.S. as part of  their war plunder and resided in Washington for three years , finally going on show and touring the country together with other paintings from the German collection before reason prevailed and the collection - and the painting - was finally repatriated back to Berlin. It hangs now in its own gallery , its original location over the alter in the chapel in the Palazzo di Medici occupied by a copy .

Again the question of real or copy , location or displacement occurs . Is it important ? , does it de-value the painting if it is removed from its original context ? Does reproduction devalue it ?

...........and the painting, the image , appears one further time over Christmas as ' Assassins Creed Brotherhood ' goes live , the picture living on in a virtual world as our hero desperately searches the Medici chapel for that hidden lever, the painting now acting as backdrop in a form ,  in a global existence that neither Cosimo di Medici or Fra Fillipo Lippi could ever have envisaged.

Some paintings do indeed live mysterious lives.