Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, missing since 1945

On 30 January 1945, crates of art were opened at the Schaffgotsch library in Cieplice, in Lower Silesia. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man was not in them. A curator of the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków told Interia in February 2026 that it vanished between 25 and 29 January. No one has reliably recorded the painting since.

The portrait is an oil on panel, dated to about 1513 to 1514 and attributed to Raphael. Both the attribution and the sitter are doubted. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, a Polish collector, bought it in Italy around 1800. With Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine and Rembrandt’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan, it was one of the “Great Three” of the family collection, shown in Kraków from 1882. The original frame hangs empty there.

The Polish Ministry of Culture’s lost-works site gives this account of the war. In August 1939 the three paintings were hidden at Sieniawa. In early October the Gestapo seized them and took them to a special commissioner for seized art. By November they were probably in Berlin, where Hitler’s agent for his planned Linz museum reserved them. That rests on testimony from 1947. The Raphael came back to Kraków in 1943, into the keeping of Hans Frank, the German Governor-General of occupied Poland. The Nuremberg tribunal convicted Frank in 1946, and he was executed on 16 October 1946, says the USHMM.

In summer 1944 Frank began to evacuate Kraków. Most likely the Raphael went to Lower Silesia. Frank left Kraków on 17 January 1945, and the collection moved to a palace at Morawa. A Swiss architect who advised Frank on art told investigators he last saw the painting there around 20 or 21 January. On 25 January Frank’s aide took 20 paintings to Bavaria, reportedly not the Raphael, because the panel was too large. A monuments conservator moved three lorry loads to Cieplice on 29 and 30 January. The Raphael was not among them. Lady with an Ermine and the Rembrandt were recovered in Bavaria after Frank’s arrest in May 1945. The Raphael was not.

The place of the loss is disputed. The Polish state site, Rzeczpospolita and the curator favour Lower Silesia. The Art Newspaper in 1998 held that Frank almost certainly took it to Bavaria. In 2024 a member of parliament asked about an informant’s claim that the original stayed in a cache at Wawel Castle. On 2 January 2025 Wawel staff said the information was not enough to confirm it, says Onet.

Many sightings and claims since 1945 remain unconfirmed. About 1960 the conservator who had cared for the paintings said he saw it in Bavaria in February 1945, then retracted this (Rzeczpospolita). In 1977 an Australian art historian wrote of a photograph of a picture in a Brisbane bank vault. He judged it an imitation, and the photograph is lost. On 1 August 2012 reports said it was found in a bank vault, citing a Polish foreign ministry envoy. The ministry said the same day it had no information. Digging at Minkowskie in 2022 and 2023 followed a letter that the curator says cannot be tied to this painting.

Estimates put the value at $100 million or more, but there is no price. In February 2026 the curator said the museum forwards every signal to the ministry’s restitution division. The portrait is still missing.