Alana collection
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"A painting by a minor master close to The Lute Player by Pontormo or the Madonna by Fra Angelico, which I rank among the greatest masterpieces in my collection." — Álvaro Saieh.[2]
The Alana collection is a private collection of paintings, owned by the Chilean economist Álvaro Saieh and his wife Ana Guzmán and kept at their residence in Newark, Delaware. The couple have been collecting since the late 1990s, starting with Italian 'primitives' and Renaissance paintings and later broadening to Baroque art.[3] The collection is described in three volumes:
From 13 September 2019 to 20 January 2020[7]., 75 pieces from the collection were loaned to the musée Jacquemart-André in Paris[8] This was the first (and according to Carlo Falciani possibly the last[9][10]) time they had been displayed outside their owners' residence
Other than El Greco's The Entombment (exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2019-2020[11][12]), the following works formed part of the Musée Jacquemart-André exhibition:[13]
Cimabue's Mocking of Christ
According to Carole Blumenfeld in la Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot, the couple were also the purchasers of Cimabue's Mocking of Christ via the Italian art dealer Fabrizio Moretti, sold for 24.18 million Euros by an auction house in Senlis, Oise on 27 October 2019.[14] Álvaro Saieh had effectively resigned from the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art just before the sale in order to bid freely on the work.[15] The work was classified a national treasure on 23 December 2019 by France's Ministry of Culture,[16] banning its export from French territory for 30 months to allow the Louvre time to raise enough money to acquire it.[17] If it had not done so, an export license would have been granted to the work and it would have joined the Alana collection.[18]