Raffaello Sanzio — Raphael — painted the Portrait of a Young Man in oil on a wood panel, 28 by 22 inches, around 1512. The clear-eyed face of the nobleman looks down on the viewer from the elongated neck. Fine dark eyebrows, the long curly hair beneath the rich cap are pretty enough to be feminine. Prince Adam Czartoryski, the Polish aristocrat who bought the painting in 1807 in Venice, regarded it as Raphael’s self-portrait.
The Czartoryski family, possessing both wealth and taste, acquired a large collection of antiquities, porcelain, graphics, and paintings, the stars of which were the Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine, and Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan. The collection opened to the public in 1876 in Krakow’s old City Arsenal.
During the Second World War, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland, confiscated the Czartoryski “Big Three” paintings to hang in his baronial apartments in Krakow’s Wawel Castle. The paintings had already been earmarked by other high-ranking Nazis: Herman Goering had whisked them away to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, while Hitler’s art deputy coveted them for the FÜhrer’s personal collection in Linz, Austria. In 1942, however, the paintings were shipped out of Berlin by train to escape the bombing. They were returned to Dr. Frank in Krakow with the understanding that they would go to Linz after Germany won the war. In January 1945, with the war lost and the Russians closing in, Dr. Frank ordered an assistant to drive a truck loaded with art to his villa at Neuhaus, just south of Munich, two days ahead of Frank himself.
In June 1945, while examining the art cache that had been taken from Dr. Frank’s house, the allies opened one of the cases to find a dozen paintings including da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine and Rembrandt’s Landscape. There was no sign of the Raphael. In 1955 the Czartoryski family tried to trace the missing painting but with no success. There is conjecture that the painting may be lying unidentified in some attic or cellar.
Perhaps because Hitler was a failed painter, works of art acquired a rare importance in the Third Reich. The confiscation of art became a priority of war and was carried out by numerous branches of government. Official looters had at their disposal the necessary staff for the job, as well as clearance to commandeer the trucks, trains, and fuel required to transport warehouses of art out of their country of origin and back to Germany. With one country after another falling to the Wehrmacht, the Nazis had access to an ever-expanding supply of booty. Not only government agencies profited. German officials and SS officers regularly travelled as diplomats to Switzerland where dealers bought paintings and artifacts stolen from private homes all over occupied Europe. The Nazi plunder of European art during the Third Reich stands unprecedented in history. Fifty-five years after the war, many important works of art are still missing.