Hear from Florian Schmitt and Frick Pittsburgh chief curator, Dawn Brean, as they examine the journey of the lost masterpiece “Madonna 207B,” as well as the professional and personal connections made to it.

For over half a century, the “Madonna 207B“, a Renaissance masterpiece from the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, was a ghost. Officially recorded as “destroyed by fire” in a Berlin flak tower in 1945, its fate remained one of the great mysteries of the post-war art world until it was uncovered by Florian Schmitt in 2025. This talk moves beyond the dry archives of provenance research to explore the painting’s secret “American reality”: six decades spent as an unsuspecting centerpiece of suburban life in Pittsburgh.