Portrait of a Young Man — Raphael
Region — where it (roughly) is
Land & claims · BLM · live
The story
It is widely called the most important painting still missing from the Second World War — a Raphael that vanished into the chaos of the Reich and never came back.
The portrait belonged to the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków. During the war it was taken, swept up in the Nazi looting of Poland's cultural treasures, and folded into the private orbit of the occupiers. Its last documented sighting places it with Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, in 1945 — and there the trail goes cold. As the Reich collapsed, the painting slipped out of the record and into the long list of masterpieces that the war simply erased from view.
That is what makes it singular. Among the thousands of works the Nazis stole, this one stands out: a Raphael, by one of the supreme names of the Renaissance, gone without resolution. Its value is estimated at around $120 million, with some figures running above $200 million — but the loss is measured less in money than in the fact that a painting of this rank remains, after eight decades, unaccounted for.
The hunt has never closed. The portrait is actively tracked by Poland's Ministry of Culture and by the Monuments Men & Women Foundation, the institutional descendants of the wartime effort to recover looted art. They keep the case open because the painting was never confirmed destroyed — only lost from sight after 1945.
So its status is plain and unresolved: stolen, last seen with Hans Frank, never recovered. The most wanted painting of the war is still out there, or gone, and no one yet knows which.
Fact vs. legend: Raphael's portrait was looted from the Czartoryski Museum in WWII and last documented with Nazi governor Hans Frank in 1945; it remains missing and actively tracked by Poland's Ministry of Culture and the Monuments Men & Women Foundation — its fate unresolved.
Search area: The point marks last seen at Hans Frank's villa, Neuhaus am Schliersee, Bavaria, Germany (stolen from the Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland) — the search area or landmark, not the treasure, whose exact location is unknown.