青年の肖像

Raphael painted this young man, probably around 1513, and many have thought the confident face is his own, a self-portrait. For a long time it hung in the Czartoryski collection in Kraków as one of Poland's great treasures. Then in 1939 the Germans invaded. The painting was hidden, found by the Gestapo, and taken by Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, who kept it and meant it for a museum Hitler planned to build. It has not been seen since 1945. Of all the works looted in the war and never recovered, this is often called the most important still missing. In the museum in Kraków its empty frame is sometimes shown where the picture should be.