Portrait of a Young Man

In the summer of 1944, as German forces pulled back through Tuscany, this small panel was among hundreds of Uffizi paintings hidden for safekeeping in a villa at Poppi, in the hills east of Florence. That August, soldiers of a retreating German division loaded it onto a truck. The vehicle was last recorded passing through Forli on the 31st of August, heading north, and neither it nor this portrait has been seen since. The sitter has never been identified, though his shoulder-length hair and plain dark dress fit a young Italian merchant of the kind who did business in Bruges, where Memling had his workshop. Everything known about the panel today comes from photographs taken before the war. It remains on the international register of works taken in those years and still missing.