An early painting by French artist Paul Cezanne has been tracked down in a private Italian collection 60 years after it went missing.
The work is a copy of a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese, Cena in Casa di Simone or the Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee (1570).
The announcement of the discovery was made by the organizers of an exhibition at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi which will play host to the painting from next month.
"It was probably made between 1860 and 1870, when the young Cezanne went to the Louvre to copy past masterpieces, especially Italian and Venetian paintings," explained Francesca Bardazzi, the art historian who uncovered the work.
She said the painting was last seen in Florence in 1945, when it was part of an exhibition of Cezanne works owned by Egisto Paolo Fabbri, an American collector who lived in the Tuscan city.
"It took over 10 years of research to find it," said Bardazzi, who is also the curator of the Palazzo Strozzi show, entitled Cezanne in Florence.
"The turning point was when I managed to get in touch with Fabbri's heirs and made this important discovery thanks to an exchange of documents".
The painting - an oil on canvas that is 29 cm by 61 cm - will go on display with a letter Cezanne wrote to Fabbri in 1899 and a photograph of the artist with Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Both items were found with the work.
Cezanne in Florence also features dozens of other paintings which once belonged to Fabbri and to Charles Loeser, another Florence-based American collector and admirer of the French master.
The show, which runs from March 2 to July 29, is a unique opportunity to see these works together as both collections were broken up after World War II.
Usually the paintings are scattered around top museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg and Washington's National Gallery of Art.
The exhibition also includes fine paintings by some of Cezanne's contemporaries, such as Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh and John Singer Sargent.
Critics credit Cezanne (1839-1906) as being the bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and the new forms of artistic expression that emerged in the 20th century, including Cubism.
