Portrait of a Gentleman

Portrait of a Gentleman is a painting with a history. Painted at some point during the first two decades of the sixteenth century by the Italian master Raffaello Sanzio, the divine Raphael himself (a contention which some scholars contest, but that’s a whole other blog post), it travelled from court to court in Italy after the painter’s death in 1520, before heading north to the estate of a Polish aristocrat. Hidden at various points in its history from both the Russians and the Germans, and ultimately stolen by the Nazis, it has become the holy grail of lost Renaissance art.

It is generally agreed that after Raphael’s death the painting became the property of Giulio Romano, one of the master’s most talented pupils. Romano took it with him to the court of the Dukes of Mantua, where it stayed for some time. The painting subsequently made its way to the Giustiniani family in Venice, by way of the court at Modena. It was in Venice that the Giustinianis, fallen on hard times in a city still mourning its loss of independence to Napoleon, sold Portrait of a Gentleman to Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and his brother Konstanty, somewhere between 1798 and 1801 (again, opinions differ on the exact date).

No doubt prompted by his mother, Princess Izabella Czartoryska, who opened Poland’s first museum, known as the “Gothic House”, at the family estate in Pulawy in 1801, Prince Adam Jerzy made a number of canny purchases on his travels. In addition to the Raphael, he bought Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady With an Ermine and Rembrandt’s Landscape With the Good Samaritan; together, the three paintings would experience an eventful history.

The trio experienced their first flight from the enemy in 1830, following the doomed anti-Czarist uprising of November that year, when they were evacuated to Sieniewa Palace. They subsequently accompanied Prince Adam Jerzy into Parisian exile.

In 1848 Prince Adam Jerzy sent Portrait of a Gentleman to London, where it spent the following three years, possibly in the hope of selling it. It returned to his apartments at the Hotel Lambert in Paris in 1851.

The paintings returned to Poland in the 1870s, and were displayed in the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, the ancient seat of Polish kings.

World War One saw them on the move once more, dispatched to the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden for safe-keeping. Gallery director Hans Posse, a name that would recur in the story of the Czartoryski masterpieces, was reluctant to hand them back, and the paintings didn’t return to Poland until 1920.

Swansong of a masterpiece

It was in August 1939, in anticipation of the German invasion, that the three paintings were packed up again, in a crate marked “VRR” (for Vinci, Raphael and Rembrandt). They were hidden once more at Sieniewa, along with over 5,000 other paintings, porcelains and antiquities from the Czartoryski Collection. But it wasn’t long before their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo.

They quickly became the subject of a tug-of-war between Hitler, Goering and the German governor of Poland, Hans Frank. Goering’s representative Kajetan Mühlmann took them to Berlin, where Hans Posse, he of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, suggested they be earmarked for Hitler’s planned museum at Linz. Yet somehow Hans Frank managed to get them back in Poland, where they decorated his offices at Cracow’s Wawel Castle. Mühlmann once reprimanded Frank for hanging the delicate Leonardo over a radiator.

The Czartoryski masterpieces were never actually catalogued in the Linz collection, but Mühlmann later testified at Nuremberg that they would undoubtedly have gone there had Germany won the war. As it was, Wawel Castle was where Portrait of a Gentleman was last seen.

The Russians are coming

By January 1945 it was clear that Hans Frank was about to lose his little fiefdom. He packed up his loot and fled, but for some reason he didn’t take Portrait of a Gentleman with him. Whatever happened – whether it was destroyed, or appropriated by someone on Frank’s staff or confiscated by a Russian trophy brigade – we’ll probably never know. Along with over 800 other items from the Czartoryski Collection, Portrait of a Gentleman hasn’t been seen since.

Jung Chang (Guy Aitchison/Wikimedia Commons)

The writer Jung Chang cut a petite and stylish figure at the Purcell Room in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on Tuesday night. Her hair piled atop her head in an elegantly messy bun, she spoke eloquently to a packed audience of the experiences of writing Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story, and growing up in a China in the grip of tyranny.

Wild Swans, prompted by sixty hours of taped interviews with her mother, quickly became a publishing phenomenon. At the time of its publication, however, she had no idea about how it would be received. Her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, assured her it was a great book, “And I trust his judgement,” she said, to much laughter.

Since its first publication in 1991, Wild Swans has sold some 10 million copies and been translated into 30 languages (although it is still banned in China). It is the most successful non-fiction book in British publishing history. I first read it some years ago, and remember being equal parts enthralled and horrified. Jung Chang’s account of life in twentieth century China reads like something from another, terrifying, planet. The book has been adapted into a play which is currently running at the Young Vic (from 13 April to 13 May 2012).

The book, as you probably know, details the life of her mother and grandmother, along with her own experiences as, initially, the pampered child of the elite and later the daughter of a family in disgrace. Her family’s story is, in many respects, China’s story. Her grandmother was the concubine to a warlord, her mother a recruit to the Communist underground at the age of fifteen, her father rising to a position of some power in the Communist party. But the family’s service did not help them when Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, which saw them denounced.

She spoke of Mao’s cult of personality, and how programmed everyone was to worship him. She was as caught up in it as a youngster as everyone else, and it took years to throw off such conditioning. She went from, briefly, being a Red Guard in 1966, to lowering her head and pretending to sob when Mao’s death was announced in 1976, an experience she was reminded of when watching the scenes of mass grief from North Korea when Kim Jong-Il died last December.

“The power of brainwashing can never be underestimated,” she said.

Her following book, Mao: The Unknown Story, co-written with her husband, was the product of twelve years of research and excited some controversy on its publication in 2005. “If it weren’t controversial, I would have regarded it as a monumental failure,” she told the audience.

She recounted the ups and downs of their research, from her husband scouring the Russian archives during a brief window of openness to cornering President Mobuto of Zaire in a hair salon in a hotel in Hong Kong.

Today’s China has changed almost unrecognisably from the poverty-stricken, regimented, scary country of Jung Chang’s youth, but she admitted to a certain pessimism about the future. The country has grown more aggressive in recent years, and she wondered whether the leadership have brought into their own propaganda about China’s strength, envisioning a China that is stronger than it actually is.

On a lighter note, I was excited to learn of her latest project, a biography of the Dowager Empress Cixi, who began her ascent to power as an imperial concubine, which should be published next year. China doesn’t lack for larger than life characters.

I recently uploaded my story The Perfect Wave to Smashwords in a bid to spread my net a bit wider, and in so doing have come across a number of interesting new writers I probably wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. This has been a fun aspect of the digital self-publishing phenomenon – finding new writers with fresh voices and interesting tales to tell.

My latest find is Corbitt Nesta’s The Gray Stag and the White Lady, a short story dealing with some of my favourite things – Italian food, difficult relatives and ghosts. There’s a castle involved too. The story opens as chef Luigi Beltani is about to open his new restaurant, The Gray Stag. He is understandably nervous, and anxious that his wife and mother-in-law don’t upset matters. He can heave a sigh of relief as things go well, but then the town’s spooky history begins to make itself felt. Is there anything to the stories about the Devil’s field or the White Lady? Luigi is about to find out.

There’s a great blend of the pragmatic – as far as Luigi is concerned, ghost stories are great PR – and the supernatural, and it’s a mix that is reflected in the writing, with the increasingly spooky atmosphere softened by a lovely undercurrent of humour. The Gray Stag and the White Lady requires careful reading – there are a lot of names to remember – but it’s definitely worth the effort. I”ll be looking out for more from Corbitt Nesta (she has another short story at Smashwords – Podesta’s Brooch).

The man with the blue sleeve - Titian, about 1510 (Wikipedia/public domain) - painting included in Titian's First Masterpiece exhibition

For many, the artist Titian IS Venetian painting. The grand old man of the Venice art world, Titian was the first truly international artist of the Renaissance, with patrons and clients ranging from the Holy Roman Emperor to the King of Spain. Yet even Titian was young once, with nothing but a precocious talent to recommend him. In Venice at the turn of the sixteenth century, he was a breath of fresh air. Almost literally so.

For, as Antonio Mazzotta, the curator of Titian’s First Masterpiece at the National Gallery, notes, Titian was not a city boy. The son of minor nobility, he came from a small town in the Dolomite mountains, Pieve di Cadore. In around 1500, at somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, he arrived in Venice as an apprentice, soaking up knowledge like a sponge and setting about forging his own artistic identity.

The National Gallery exhibition centres on the painting, The Flight into Egypt, painted in 1506-7. It’s a large canvas, and is particularly notable for its treatment of the landscape. There’s a revolutionary freshness about the flora and fauna, distinct from the more static compositions that were the norm at that time. The deer doesn’t just sit there, looking deer-like; instead, it raises its head and sniffs the air. Like real deer do.

Though it has to be said there’s nothing Egyptian about the setting. Titian has called on his mountain boyhood to paint the lush setting through which the Holy Family are travelling.

The Flight into Egypt was commissioned by the Doge Andrea Loredan to decorate the Palazzo Loredan on the Grand Canal. It stayed there until 1768 when it was bought by Catherine the Great of Russia. For the last 12 years the painting has undergone a painstaking restoration process. The National Gallery exhibition is the first time the painting has been seen outside of Russia, which means it has mostly been outside the mainstream of Titian research.

The exhibition highlights the early period of Titian’s career, focusing on his portraits and the work of other artists who were major influences, such as Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Albrecht Dürer.

In his review in the Evening Standard, Ben Luke feels the painting isn’t quite the masterpiece of the title, but it’s near enough to make little difference.

Titian’s First Masterpiece: The Flight into Egypt runs at the National Gallery, London, from 4 April to 19 August 2012.

The Scream, Edvard Munch, (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

It was a particularly low-tech kind of theft, requiring just two men, a stolen car, a ladder, a hammer and some wire cutters. On the morning of 12 February 1994, one of the men scaled the ladder (on the second try – that ladder was a slippery bugger), took a hammer to the window and climbed into room 10 of Oslo’s National Gallery, where he proceeded to cut the wires holding Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Sliding the bulky painting down the ladder to his accomplice, the thief quickly followed.

It took just 50 seconds to steal a painting valued at $72 million.

The National Gallery had been robbed before, and it had made attempts to beef up security, but it was still far from invulnerable. Museums are, by their nature, susceptible to theft. They are meant to be places where art is accessible, not locked away in vaults. And the received wisdom was that no one would steal such a famous painting, as any buyer would know it was stolen.

There was an element of mockery in the theft, coming as it did on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. As if to emphasize the fact, the thieves left a postcard behind, which said “Thanks for the poor security.”

The Yard Steps In

Art theft is an international crime. Differing laws mean that stolen art frequently surfaces far from where it originated. Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit, founded in 1969, was focused on London, but had many international contacts. The theft of The Scream quickly caught their attention. As detective Charley Hill put it in the book The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, it had “sweet fuck-all to do with policing London. But it’s too good to miss.”

It was Hill, a man with an eclectic resume – former soldier, scholar, and cop – who came up with the plan that would retrieve the The Scream, which should come as no surprise. He’s done this before, and since, retrieving such stolen masterpieces as Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, and Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

Hill’s plan saw him go undercover as ‘The Man from the Getty’. The richest museum in the world, the Getty has a reputation for having exceedingly deep pockets and for spending profligately. The Norwegian government couldn’t pay for the painting, so the cover story went, but the Getty could. In return, Norway would loan it the painting.

So Charley Hill became Christopher Charles Roberts, complete with Getty Museum ID and business cards.

In tandem with the Norwegian investigation, run by Detective Leif Lier, the Art Squad sting went into effect. Hill/Roberts brought £500,000 with him to Norway to meet the go-betweens. The hotel at which they met, the Oslo Plaza, was hosting the Scandinavian Narcotics Officers Annual Convention, which gave their dodgy contacts reason for suspicion which required some fast talking on Hill’s part to allay. Such is the life of an undercover policeman.

After a fraught investigation and a number of meetings with some distinctly dodgy people, The Scream was recovered in May. A triumphant press conference followed. Four men were charged with stealing the painting, receiving sentences from six years, three months to two years and eight months.

The story doesn’t end there, of course. Art theft is an ongoing crime. In his afterward to The Rescue Artist, Edward Dolnick notes that after he had sent in his manuscript in 2004, he heard a news report about another art theft in Oslo of …. you guessed it, The Scream.