IN THE VERY first James Bond film,
Dr No, Sean Connery finally invades the villain’s luxurious lair. Walking down an elegant staircase, he glances at a painting on the wall. Goya’s
Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, recently stolen from the National Gallery, gazes back at him. “So that’s where it went,” mutters Bond with a sardonic grin.
Ever since seeing Dr No as an impression-able teenager in 1962 I have been tempted to imagine that lost masterpieces all end up in similar hide-outs. Goya’s Duke was returned to its owner. But what about all the other paintings and sculpture that remain tantalisingly untraced? Even works prized by their devoted owners have vanished, often in tangled circumstances.
Fascinated by their disappearance, Gert-Rudolf Flick, an academic and art collector, has written a diligently researched book about 24 elusive treasures. He hunts down every surviving record of their whereabouts, and explores the identity of the acquisitive monarchs, aristocrats and grandees who once doted on them.
Although Flick calls the book Missing Masterpieces, not all of his subjects deserve such an accolade. If Pordenone’s lumbering Hercules and Achelous resurfaced, I doubt whether it would be hailed as a landmark in European painting. Nor would Cariani’s ponderous Christ Carrying the Cross, in which St Veronica offers him a towel miraculously imprinted with the image of the suffering redeemer. But plenty of the images investigated by Flick would certainly be acclaimed if they were tracked down today.
Supreme among them is Michelangelo’s bronze version of David, a statue he worked on while carving his celebrated colossus of the same biblical hero. Not as large as his marble David, the lost bronze figure was still almost life-size. And we do know that it showed the young warrior resting his foot proudly on Goliath’s decapitated head. Michelangelo’s surviving drawing shows how brutally David crushes his victim’s head, pressing down hard on his distended right eye. Commissioned by the city of Florence in 1502, it served a blatantly political purpose, ending up as a gift to Florimond Robertet, the French king’s powerful finance minister. Delighted by this magnificent present, the art-loving Robertet ensured in return that Florence regained its lost control of Pisa. He then took his prize back to France, installing it at the centre of a courtyard in his splendid new chateau at Bury, near Blois.
Over two centuries later, a descendant of the statue’s subsequent owner was guillotined during the Terror of the French Revolution. By that time, everyone had forgotten that Michelangelo made the bronze. Confiscated by zealous members of the Monuments Committee, it was listed in official documents and then disappeared from history.
Titian’s Portrait of Isabella d’Este in Red must have been a remarkable painting, too. One of the outstanding patrons of the Renaissance, she created jewel-like rooms in her private quarters at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. There, classical antiquities were displayed alongside commissioned paintings by Mantegna, and Leonardo drew her in 1499. The portrait, now preserved in the Louvre, is almost as beguiling as the Mona Lisa. And Isabella was delighted with Titian’s extant portrait of herself dressed in black. “Titian pleases us so much,” she wrote, “that we doubt that we were ever in that state in which he represents us with the beauty in that picture.” But she is unlikely to have been so gratified by his lost portrait of her. Judging by a copy of the portrait done by Rubens, it was probably painted from life. Flushed and overweight, with a heavy rope of pearls slung from her plump neck, she stares from the canvas with a defensive, even sulky, air. Isabella may have suspected that Titian’s intentions were unflattering, and yet Rubens’s copy also suggests that the vanished portrait was an impressive study of a woman cruelly described by Pietro Aretino as “disgracefully ugly and even more deplorably un-made-up”.
In 1628 the Titian was sold to Charles I, and disappeared after his death. Included in the Commonwealth Sale ordered by Oliver Cromwell, it passed to one of Charles’s many creditors. The King’s Silkman, a draper called John Geere, was able to acquire Isabella in Red in partial settlement of his unpaid services. But he is the final recorded owner of this sumptuous painting, which may still be lurking, unrecognised, somewhere in England.
The trail runs just as cold for other paintings pursued by Flick with admirable and dogged persistence. Where, now, is Caravaggio’s brooding seated portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta? Whatever happened to Poussin’s Time Saving Truth from Envy and Discord, not to mention an exquisite pair of paintings by Chardin, The Drawing Lesson and A Girl Reciting her Gospel? Must we abandon all hope of recovering Correggio’s haunting altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with St Mary Magdalen and St Lucy? The painting was forcibly removed from its Italian church in 1647, on the orders of the ruthless Francesco d’Este, Duke of Modena. He commissioned a copy and gave it to the church, but Correggio’s irreplaceable original vanished during the many vicissitudes by the duke’s descendants.
Its destiny must remain a matter of conjecture, like Rembrandt’s painting of The Circumcision. Executed in 1646 for Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, this shadowy scene belonged to a series depicting the Passion of Christ. Most of them survive in Munich, but the glowing Circumcision was lost during the 18th century. Perhaps it had been damaged beyond repair, for the other paintings in the series were restored in 1755. Only a copy now provides us with a notion of how Rembrandt depicted the delicate operation on the Christ child, in a lofty temple where everyone seems overawed by the event.
The strangest of all these frustrating stories concerns Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated painting of Lepeletier on his Death Bed. It became an icon of the French Revolution, commemorating the murder of a man who, having been president of the supreme legal court in France, fervently voted for the king’s death in January 1793. Four days later he was stabbed to death by a former royal bodyguard.
The killing gave the National Convention a ready-made “Martyr de la Liberté”. At Lepeletier’s state funeral, his half-naked body was placed on a pedestal, posed like Christ in a pietà, with fatal wound and murder weapon fully exposed. David sat at the base of the monument drawing the corpse, which appeared to bleed. And Lepeletier’s 11-year-old daughter, Suzanne-Louise, whose mother had died a decade earlier, was symbolically adopted by the Convention as the first “Orphan of the Nation”.
Over the next few months, David painted the cult-hero on his death bed, stretched out beneath a blood-smeared sword impaling a piece of paper inscribed “I vote for the death of the tyrant”. David’s painting was lauded by the Convention, who displayed it in their Assembly building next to the president’s chair. It was joined there by David’s even more uncompromising painting of Marat assassinated in his bath, now preserved in a Brussels museum.
Both pictures were eventually returned to the artist. The Lepeletier canvas, however, has vanished. Suzanne-Louise bought it after her father’s death in 1826. Since she had become an ardent royalist, many feared that she might burn the painting. But it was still widely regarded as an outstanding achievement, and before her early death in 1829 she asked a close relative to “keep it for me carefully”. Soon after, rumours of a garden bonfire circulated among people convinced that the painting had been destroyed. But in 1860, according to the art critic Champfleury, it had passed safely into the hands of the Marquis de Boisgelin, who “is concealing the portrait from all eyes”.
He certainly succeeded, for the painting has never been seen since then. Even so, the mystery surrounding its fate means that Lepeletier on his Death Bed may, like the other images investigated by Flick, resurface one day. Anyone who reads this absorbing book is bound to emerge with a determination to be more alert, especially in the dark recesses of grandparents’ attics or obscure shops where dust-smothered old paintings are stacked against the wall. After all, the vanished Rembrandt or Titian might just be there, waiting for you in the gloom.
- Missing Masterpieces: Lost Works of Art 1450-1900 by Gert-Rudolf Flick is published by Merrell at £40
