The Boston Raphael. Belinda Rathbone

of all adventures – negotiations for the Raphael,” to which he added in big block letters “(CONFIDENTIALLY).”¹

      It was indeed the greatest of all adventures. In fact, it was the beginning of an art-world cause célèbre of international scope, a milestone in the history of art collecting, and also the unraveling of my father’s thirty-two-year career as a museum director.

      We waited in the dusky entranceway for Signora Giusti to appear. Greetings in both languages came eagerly to the fore as a sturdy middle-aged woman arrived at the desk. She guided us out the staff door and across the piazza, through another giant door into the West Wing, and up a wide stone staircase. Upstairs the walls were lined with metal racks upon which old master paintings were hung floor to ceiling. A white-smocked preparator led us farther into a small, windowless room. Standing at a worktable, he folded back the white tissue paper around a small portrait on a panel – just 10½ by 8½ inches – unframed, as starkly naked as a patient on an operating table.

      I remembered her well – a young girl of about twelve or thirteen, impeccably dressed in rich velvet and lace, decorated from headdress to belt in exquisite Renaissance finery. Her name was Eleonora Gonzaga – at least it was the last time I had seen her – and she was of noble lineage, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Mantua. If there was a difference in my fresh impression, it was that she looked somewhat colder and cleaner, as if nothing beneath her impeccable jewel-like surface was left to be penetrated. Her trace of a smile and her steady gaze – poised and confident, but with the innocence of adolescence – betrayed little of her life to date and nothing of her travels since. She was as mysterious as ever.

      The painting had been sent to a conservation lab in Rome following its return from Boston some years earlier, where it was cleaned and closely studied by various experts. At that time, said Giusti, choosing her words carefully, “the consensus was that it is not by Raphael.”

      Expert opinions just a few years earlier than that had been quite different. “Before lunch the verdict was delivered,” my father wrote to my mother on July 15, 1969. “A genuine early Raphael.”²

      From being quite sure that it was an early work of Raphael, to being quite sure that it was not, the trend of expert opinion rode the waves during the painting’s brief thirteen-month period of public exposure in Boston. At the same time, another struggle, equally if not more diverting, was over the manner of its exportation from Italy and arrival in Boston.

      The little portrait had become the object of a contest, which usually means that only one side can win. While its acquisition was designed to serve one purpose – as a centennial prize for the MFA and the crowning acquisition of my father’s tenure – its return to Italy served another – as a trophy for Italy’s top art sleuth, Rodolfo Siviero. For the purposes of both parties, it was imperative to believe in its attribution to Raphael. But once the struggle for ownership was settled, in favor of Italy, the debate over its attribution left the international arena. The last time the picture was publicly exhibited was at the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, in a memorial exhibition to Siviero after he died in 1984. The wall label accompanying it stated noncommittally, “Attributed to Raphael.” Many visitors saw it there for the first time, and some remembered the controversy surrounding it. The label begged the question, and they came to their own conclusions, or not. While the picture still represented one of the most celebrated of Siviero’s repatriation efforts, it was no longer officially considered a Raphael. All that fuss, and it wasn’t a Raphael after all?

      What had been a widely aired embarrassment to Boston had become a somewhat lesser and soon forgotten embarrassment to Italy. Perhaps this is what I sensed behind the manner of Signora Giusti. While its ownership was by now apparently beyond dispute, the picture was still tainted with the struggle over its cultural patrimony, which now seemed even more ironic given its consignment to storage. For all intents and purposes, it had been successfully buried. Our little pilgrimage and its brief resurrection had ruffled her feathers.

      “If not by Raphael,” asked Cecilia, “then who?”

      “Emilian School,” pronounced Giusti.

      “What about the girl,” I pressed, “her identity?”

      “Unknown,” she answered without a pause.

      After we had stared at the painting as long as we politely could, I made a snapshot, and the man in the smock wordlessly folded it away. We groped for more information about the intervening years and the expert opinions that had been visited upon it. Obligingly, Giusti led us away to her small office, where she operated from a crowded desk surrounded by stacks of books and piles of papers, and shared with us articles from the Italian press on the subject of the “Rafaello di Boston.” She hurried in and out of the office to the photocopier down the hall and returned with piles of copies for each of us. The longer we spent in her company, the more her tone became defensive and hurried. The more questions we asked, the shorter her answers. She performed with the patience and armor of a carefully instructed civil servant, but her act was under strain. Finally, she summarized. Any research we might carry forward from there, she assured us, would only lead to the same conclusion. There was nothing left to say, and there was nothing left to do. The painting had left Italy illegally, and it was no longer considered a Raphael. She politely reminded us that the holiday weekend was upon her. We bade our bilingual good-byes and thanked her for her time, and with that she led us through a back door into the early Renaissance galleries for what was left of the afternoon.

      What had we come in search of anyway? To revisit the object that led to my father’s downfall, as if gazing upon it might deliver some kind of resolution? Was it a ritual we needed to perform to achieve what we now call closure? Or was it simply, at long last, to answer the question that occasionally arose at the family dinner table when the subject of the Raphael came up for review? What had they done to it in the laboratory? What had they discovered, and how definitive were their conclusions? And where was it now? After a protracted and bitter struggle over getting it back, the Italians had done exactly what my father had most feared: they had made it their hostage. They had buried the story, along with the deposed work of art. The case was closed, and the trail was cold. Confirming this reality in person felt somewhat anticlimactic, like visiting the grave of someone you were already quite certain was dead.

      But a few months later, the reaction of certain experts gave the story an unexpected lift. “I felt the picture had been swept under the carpet,”³ said Nicholas Penny when I visited him in March 2006 at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, where he was then head of European paintings.⁴ For Penny, a deeply knowledgeable and refreshingly outspoken Englishman, his firsthand encounter with the little painting had been a formative experience. He had first seen the painting when it was unveiled in Boston, in 1970. At the time a graduate student in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, Penny was on a visit to Boston with his American bride. Fascinated, he had carried home a small color reproduction of the painting he had bought in the museum shop. After following the story of its demise, he later published the image in his 1983 book, Raphael, with Roger Jones, identifying the artist as “perhaps Raphael.”⁵

      “My intention was to bring it back to light,” said Penny. “Even if it’s not by Raphael, it’s still a very interesting picture.” But Penny remained puzzled by the fact that my father had approached just one Raphael scholar for an opinion – John Shearman, who had been Penny’s professor at the Courtauld. Had Rathbone consulted others, he might have been on firmer ground. Was it his commitment to confidentiality that made him play his cards so close to his chest? Was it Shearman’s well-known tendency to isolate himself from his fellow scholars? Either way, would a second opinion have strengthened, or weakened, the case? No matter what, Penny surmised, in a case of a precious and rare picture believed to be the work of a great Renaissance artist, it had been “fatal to go the lone path. . . . What you underestimate are the weapons that are being sharpened with envy.”⁶

      Not long afterward I spoke with another Raphael scholar, Paul Joannides, at the University of Cambridge, who saw the picture for the first time at the exhibition at the Palazzo Vecchio in 1984. “I would tend to think that Shearman was probably right,” he told me. The picture,