Ritratto di dama

This portrait has one of the strangest recent stories in the art world. It once belonged to Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, and was looted by the Nazis in 1940 after he fled the Netherlands. For 80 years it was missing. Then, in 2025, it turned up in the background of a real estate photo advertising a house in the Argentine seaside town of Mar del Plata, hanging on a wall above a sofa. Who actually painted it is still argued. It has long been linked to Fra Galgario, a Bergamo portraitist known for shrewd, lively faces, though scholars going back to the 1920s assigned it instead to another Lombard painter, Giacomo Ceruti. The Argentine house belonged to the family of a former Nazi financial official who had settled there after the war.