2020 IB Extended Essays

7

displayed in the Fuhrermurseum, a gallery of confiscated artwork stolen by Nazi soldiers across Europe. The gallery never actually came to fruition and in January 1945, Hans Frank, the appointed governor general of Poland and leader of the Gestapo, took “Portrait of a Young Man” and “Lady with an Ermine” back in his possession for his own display in the royal castle. This was the last location that Raphael’s painting was seen. Following Germany’s evacuation from Poland, it was suggested that Frank stole the paintings from the castle and stored them in his own villa in Bavaria. In 1945, after the second world war had ended, Frank was arrested and executed for war crimes and the stored paintings in the villa, along with “Portrait of a Young Man”, were returned to Poland and displayed in Czartoyski Museum. When retrieved, a footprint had been found in the centre of the piece. Hitler could have considered Raphael’s “Portrait of a Young Man” as a defiant of Nazism as it is a self-portrait and therefore, reflects individualism. “Lady with an Ermine” Hitler most likely described the National Socialist revolution as counter- renaissance due to how the renaissance has connotations to rebirth where everything returns back to its origin in a beautiful way while a revolution is a forceful eradication of previous ways to lay down a new path, in the same way that Hitler mass murdered Jews, homosexuals and disables in order to unite Germany (Evans, 2003).