Raphael

In a house in Baltimore, a mature-looking woman with pale, patrician flesh above her square-cut bodice, with brows like ribbons over quiet, uninterested dark eyes, looks out from a wooden panel at the doings of Jacob Epstein. Mr. Epstein, once a peddler,* now a dry-goods millionaire, will admit to a few friends that the lady cost him $250,000--about $1,250 per square inch since the portrait is only 17 in. x 11 3/8 in. Her name is Emilia Pia de Montefeltro, and to set his mind at rest as to whether or not she was painted by her fellow townsman Raphael Sanzio, Mr. Epstein has letters from such authorities as Connoisseur Bernhard Berenson of Paris and Dr. George Gronau of Cassell, Germany. Mr. Epstein's agents, F. Kleinberger Inc., of Manhattan, told last week how Dr. Gronau had discovered her, through a friendly priest, in a dusty room in a decaying house in an old precinct of Vienna.

Modernist noses are elevated at any mention of Raphael Sanzio. It is fashionable, in some circles, to prefer the austerities and twisted imperfections of painters who, as they say, "knew less and hence could feel more," the pre-Raphael primitives. But the "modernists" of today are the conservatives of tomorrow. Painter Raphael's fame has never been any more gravely beclouded than was his princely young life, which, beginning at the ducal court of Urbino where his painter-father enjoyed generous patronage, was strewn with the gold of rulers and the blandishments of their women, in Perugia, Florence, Rome. One of his mistresses became "Poetry" in the Vatican; another, the Sistine Madonna.

Such has been Raphael's fame that all his pictures have been taken away from little Urbino just as he was. Not one remains. Nor is there is a peddler-millionaire in Urbino with 5,250,000 lire to spend in bringing back even a small-size Raphael of questioned authenticity.

But there is Mussolini, director-general of everything from apple-carts to art in Italy. The citizens of Urbino lately sent a delegation to Rome and last week II Duce decided to take down, from its hooks in the Uffizi at Florence, Raphael's portrait of a relative of Emilia Pia de Montefeltro, one Francesco Maria Della Revere, Duke of Urbino and patron of its painters. After a fitting period of exhibition in the Ministry of Public Education at Rome, the duke will be restored to his duchy, courtesy of Signor Raphael Sanzio.

*And not to be confused with expressionistic Sculptor Jacob Epstein of London.