By David Minthorn

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK CITY (AP) — One of art history’s most intriguing mysteries is the identity of the nude model for “La Fornarina,’’ the baker’s daughter, Raphael’s sensuous masterpiece of Renaissance portraiture.

Was the undraped beauty Raphael’s mistress, whose legendary sexual power reputedly led to his untimely death of a fever at age 37 in 1520? Or was she a comely artist’s model of unknown background rendered as Venus in Sixteenth Century trappings? Or was she the alluring bride of banker Agostino Chigi, financier of the Pope and the artist’s greatest patron?

Historians have debated the portrait’s identity for five centuries, and now an Italian expert claims to have the answer, which is revealed in a brochure accompanying the first US showing of “La Fornarina.’’

Claudio Strinati, superintendent of the Nations Museums of Rome, contends that the portrait is misnamed from a never-proven relationship Raphael supposedly had with a sexy baker’s daughter. Instead, she is Francesca Ardeasca on the eve of her marriage to Chigi, “dressed as a bride, at once provocative and chaste ... whose beauty, disturbing and appealing, captivated a man of immense power and wealth.’’

With a smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa to whom she has been compared, her portrait is on display at the Frick Collection, only the second time it has traveled outside Italy, from the National Gallery at Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

Measuring 34 inches by 24½  inches, the oil on wooden panel is on display in the Frick’s Oval Room through January 30, followed by stops at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Its only other showing abroad was in Paris in 2000.

“La Fornarina’’ was brought to New York under auspices of the Foundation of Italian Art and Culture, founded to bring great art from Italy’s 3,000-year heritage to the American public.

Maria Grazia Bernardini, director of the national gallery, said at a press viewing that the portrait was chosen because it is riveting enough to stand on its own. She noted its luminous condition after a recent restoration.

Denying that the portrait was scandalous for its time, Bernardini described it as “very personal, very intimate’’ but intended for private viewing. A mystery since its completion around 1520, the work was first mentioned in a 1595 letter extolling private collections in Rome. It eventually came into possession of the aristocratic Barberini family, and is now a national treasure.

The brunette with almond eyes and a then-fashionable turban clutches diaphanous fabric to her naked breasts and belly button. Her left arm rests across her lap, which is covered with a red gown. Around her left bicep is a tiny blue ribbon, embossed with gold letters spelling, “Raphael Vrbinas’’ (Raphael of Urbino) — a reference to the artist’s birthplace, in 1483.

Scholars say the words could mean either that the artist was proclaiming his possession of the woman, as her lover, or as a dedication or sign of respect, perhaps for the patron of the portrait.

One intriguing clue was uncovered during the recent cleaning efforts in Rome, revealing a small gold ring on the ring finger of the woman’s left hand, suggesting she was engaged. But to whom?

Raphael never married, but accounts of his life say he had many liaisons with beautiful women, creating the story that La Fornarina was Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker from Siena, supposedly his last paramour and muse.

Although her ambiguous smile has been compared to Mona Lisa’s, no one knows whether Raphael saw Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous portrait, even though the painters were contemporaries — and, along with Michelangelo, formed the great triumvirate of the High Renaissance.

Raphael is best known for his ethereal religious paintings of Jesus, the Madonna and other biblical scenes. But his mastery of oils and his worldliness took art to new levels.

“He ended as a supreme innovator, revolutionary both in his way of conceptualizing an artwork — without clear distinctions between sacred and profane — and his way of representing characters and landscape,’’ Strinati writes, citing his use of shadow and light to propel art far beyond tradi-tions of the simply representational.

Antique Arabic tablet stolen a decade ago is returned to Yemen

By Verena Dobnik

Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal authorities recently returned to Yemen an antique Arabic tablet stolen from a museum there a decade ago that ended up at a New York auction house.

At a ceremony in the Manhattan headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah Alsaidi, unveiled the alabaster plaque depicting a goddess of fertility, dating to about 350 AD in Saudi Arabia.

It was taken from the museum in Yemen’s port city of Aden, where in 2000 an attack by Yemeni militants on the American destroyer USS Cole killed 17 US sailors.

Last year, agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, learned that an antiquities company owned by two brothers — both Lebanese nationals — consigned the plaque to Sotheby’s to be auctioned at an estimated price of up to $30,000.

Sotheby’s art experts found that it had not come from a private English collection as they were told, but rather from the Aden Museum. Federal agents seized the plaque and arrested one of the brothers, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge not directly related to the plaque and is serving a five-year probation sentence, said ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi.

David Kelley, the US Attorney in Manhattan, said Wednesday that international probes into stolen art have been bolstered by the war on terrorism, which has strengthened ties between the United States and countries such as Yemen.

“The war on terror depends so much on the partnerships we forge with other countries,’’ the prosecutor said. “And those partnerships can’t be one-dimensional — they really need to be on so many different levels. This is just one of those levels.’’

Painting Chasseriau stolen from New York gallery

NEW YORK CITY (AP) — A painting by Nineteenth Century French artist Theodore Chasseriau was stolen Tuesday, November 30, from an art gallery in Manhattan, police said.

Two men entered Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd on East 78th Street at 11:15 am and one engaged the manager in a conversation about a painting while the second roamed the gallery, according to a police report.

After the two men left, the manager discovered the Chasseriau painting (circa 1851) missing, police said. The value or title of the painting, which depicts a topless woman being dressed by two other women, was not immediately known. A search was for the two men was ongoing.

Chasseriau, a disciple of French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, was a child prodigy who won a medal for his work before age 17. Ingres once remarked that Chasseriau would “be the Napoleon of painting.’’

He was known for his nudes and North African scenes and also painted churches in Paris.

Carl Larsson Painting Sold in Sweden

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — A long-lost painting by Swedish master Carl Larsson, tucked away in a private collection in France for more than a century, sold for $730,000 at a Stockholm auction recently.

The painting “Boenskoerd’’ (or “Bean Harvest’’) was sold on the opening day of a four-day fall auction at the Bukowskis Auction House, one of Sweden’s largest. The buyer’s identity was not released.

Larsson, one of Sweden’s best-known painters, completed the painting in Grez-sur-Loing in France in 1883, but its whereabouts had been uncertain since it was sold in 1884. Anna-Karin Pusic, an art historian at Bukowskis, said the previous French owner, who inherited the painting from his father in the 1940s, contacted Bukowskis this spring after a friend informed him that the painting was probably valuable.

The painting depicts a young woman in a flowery French garden putting what appears to be flowers or herbs into a big basket.

High court declines to hear fight over Hitler art

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) — The Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling allowing the US Army to keep four watercolors painted by Adolf Hitler that were seized in Germany after World War II.

Without comment, the justices turned aside a challenge by the family of late German photographer Heinrich Hoffmann Sr, which had sought either the return of the paintings as well as 2.5 million photographs — or millions of dollars in damages.

The watercolors include street scenes and war landscapes painted before and during World War I. US forces discovered them in 1945, not long after Hitler committed suicide, in a German castle where Hoffmann had stored them during the war.

Hoffmann’s family contended the photographer was a victim of wartime art pillaging and that the seizure of the paintings as well as 2.5 million photographs violated their constitutional rights. The US government countered that the photos and paintings were Nazi art that was confiscated to “de-Nazify Germany.’’

The court’s action appears to lay to rest a nearly 20-year battle involving the government, Hoffmann relatives and Houston art investor Billy F. Price, who bought rights to the works. The latest challenge involved a technical issue that brought the case back to the high court after justices refused to hear an initial appeal in 2002.

The Army keeps the paintings in government storage in Alexandria, Va.