Abstract
When works of art are returned, the museum is only one of a range of possible destinations, but in many cases, particularly for well-known works, the pieces are returned to their original location. In this way, the status of the objects has changed, but their restitution is simply a re-rental. Their life as a museum piece is resumed. This was the fate of part of the Vatican collections in 1816, and of the Medici Venus, which was returned to its place in the gallery in Florence. This was also the case in Germany for several pieces, including the antiquities of the Fridericianum Museum in Kassel, considered an incunabulum of museum construction in Europe, since in 1779 it was the first building on the continent to be designed as a museum. Another example is the Gemäldegalerie in Vienna, which moved from the Belvedere Palace in 1785, twenty years before the arrival of the French, and whose entire collection was seized by Dominique Vivant-Denon.
Other cases are more problematic and painful. During the wars of French occupation and the twenty years of the Kingdom of Westphalia in Germany, museums under French rule were mistreated, sometimes even destroyed. Other museums were also discredited on the return of the pieces, judged too small, too linked to the 18th century or, like the Munich Museum, unfit to represent the national power of the Kingdom of Bavaria.
The time it takes for reflection to begin on the right place for the returned works varies considerably from case to case, from particularly rapid - just a few weeks for the Vatican collections - to extremely slow, as in Berlin, where the museum only opened in 1830, after fifteen years of discussions on the scientific model to adopt.
