Heritage for sale

The first time I met Nicholas Penny, around 10 years ago, the first thing I asked him was, "Are you the man who discovered the Raphael?". "I'm glad you remembered that," said Penny. "That was almost a year ago and people are already beginning to forget."

But it is the kind of story that sticks in the mind, and if, like me, you are bedevilled by fantasies of discovering overlooked masterpieces, why, then it is the kind of story about which you want to learn more. Penny found the Raphael in a corridor in Alnwick Castle, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland. It was not, as it soon became in the retelling, a darkened corridor. Nor was it in the attic. It was a well-lit corridor near the private breakfast-room on the piano nobile of the castle.

Penny, who was then Clore Curator of Renaissance Art at the National Gallery in London (he is now curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington), had been visiting Alnwick to study the paintings. He had been treated well – wined and dined, put up for the night, allowed to examine everything that interested him – and was in a good mood. After lunch on the second day, he felt, on rising from the table, a sense that he ought, perhaps, to do something to show his appreciation.

He stood up, with the vague sense that there could be some pleasant, polite gesture he might make. He strolled out into the corridor and he paused in front of a picture. It was in a very well-carved 19th-century gilt boxwood frame. Along the top of the frame was its title, Madonna dei Garofani (the Madonna of the Carnations, or Pinks). On the base was the name of the artist, "Raphael". Penny (who had co-authored a book on Raphael) paused and thought: "That must have been a very expensive frame to make." And this thought, which for most of us would have been inconsequential, led on to other thoughts.

I ought here to explain that Penny is an expert on frames, as on many aspects of the decorative arts. (For the National Gallery in London, he has written a pocket guide on the subject.) Penny looked at the frame on the "Raphael" and thought it must have been expensive, and if it had been, that might well mean that the painting had once been highly valued. And if it had once been highly valued, it would be worth asking why. The composition of the picture, in which the Madonna holds a bunch of pinks in one hand, while the Child, on a cushion on her lap, examines two more of the flowers, was well known to Penny through its numerous copies – it was one of Raphael's popular works, long thought missing. And yet this version seemed of high quality. What is more, there was a visible pentimento, an artist's correction, in the little landscape at the back. Penny suggested that it might be a good idea to send the picture to the National Gallery for further study.

It arrived in London, carefully packed in white tissue paper, without its frame – a small fruitwood panel of about 11in by 9in. Jill Dunkerton, who unwrapped it in the conservation department, can still remember the moment vividly, since she had been told to expect not a Raphael but only a rather interesting painting. Yet when she placed the panel on a stand, under a good light, its quality was immediately obvious. Furthermore, when the work was examined with a vidicon machine, it was revealed to have a vigorous and beautiful underdrawing – not typical of all of Raphael's underdrawings, but well comparable to some, such as that of the painting in Washington known as The Small Cowper Madonna.

Experts were brought in, and those who were not immediately convinced by the quality of the painting itself were soon converted by the sight of the underdrawing. Penny attributed it to Raphael and, in the 10 years since its publication, this attribution seems never to have received any serious, scholarly challenge. This does not mean that there are no connoisseurs who deny the authenticity of the painting. But the overwhelming consensus has been in favour of Penny's attribution. And this degree of unanimity is hardly to be counted on in the world of the art historian. (That is one reason why the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has negotiated the purchase of the picture from the duke for some $50m [£30m].)

At the very least, Penny's original surmise proved correct: the painting had, at the time the frame was made for it, been highly valued, for it had been bought as a Raphael, in Rome in 1853, as part of the Camuccini Collection. The purchaser was the fourth Duke of Northumberland, who spent 125,000 Roman scudi (£27,589 8s 6d) on what was the last great bulk purchase for export of Italian paintings: 74 of them, including Bellini's The Feast of the Gods (now in Washington). The Raphael was valued at £2,500, the most expensive item in the collection. And it was described in 1854 with notable enthusiasm: "Of all the numerous specimens of the picture I have seen, none appear to me so well entitled to be attributed to [Raphael's] hand as this." Yet, within six years, it had been declared a copy.

What causes a painting to fall from favour, as this one did so soon after its arrival at Alnwick? What causes these relegations to lower leagues, these sudden and capricious disparagements? Chance must play a large part in it. I recently spent a weekend in the company of some of the leading Raphael scholars, who were discussing the early work of the master. What struck me, on several occasions, was their readiness to go back to early sources – not just the earliest sources but also 19th-century historians and critics – to go back to them; to be sure, for their errors, but to go back to them also for their insights.

It is not the case (or, it does not seem to be) that art history makes a definite, irreversible progress uniformly on all fronts. An observation made in 1840, disprized in 1870, and neglected ever since may turn out to suggest the solution to a problem. The great scholars from before the age of photography, who travelled around the European collections with nothing more than their notebooks and their memories to help them in their comparisons, may have been better trained in the art of observation than the modern student with a photo archive at his fingertips. They worked, after all, mainly by examining original works of art.

And then it appears that it is not wise to assume that all the archives have been ransacked for the light that they can shed. Key dates can still be found on documents. Key inscriptions may turn out to have been overlooked, or mistranscribed, or misinterpreted. It happens with Raphael, just as it happens with the works of other artists, that a single piece of evidence, or a single misapprehension, can skew the whole of our understanding.

"I paused before [the Raphael]," Penny wrote in The Independent Magazine in 1992, "chiefly because I am interested in picture frames as well as pictures, and in the history of error as well as in the history of art." Astonishing discoveries can be made in the most obvious of places. It is only a generation ago that Penny's predecessor in Trafalgar Square, Cecil Gould, stood with Konrad Oberhuber in front of the National Gallery's portrait of Pope Julius II, then usually believed to be a copy of a Raphael, and, as a result of their conversations, decided to make a complete X-ray mosaic of the painting. This research led to other inquiries that enabled Gould to prove that the National Gallery's version of the portrait was the original, which once belonged, with another Raphael painting of the Madonna, to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome.

Then along came Cardinal Sfondrati, who, in 1591, confiscated the two great works for his own collection, leaving an insulting 100-scudi offering for the church. And so began a process by which this portrait fell into obscurity. One door opens. One door closes. One masterpiece lights up. One comes crashing off the wall. One man writes: Dear Diary, today I discovered a Raphael. Another: Dear Diary, I am not sure how Mr Getty is going to take this...

I mentioned that there were two Raphaels in Santa Maria del Popolo, whisked away by Cardinal Sfondrati, to the anger of all Rome. One was the papal portrait. The other was a composition known as The Madonna of Loreto. A generation ago, one could have been forgiven for thinking that both of them had found their way, by different routes, to the National Gallery in London, for, as Gould wrote, the version of The Madonna of Loreto "which has the best claim to being original is that at present on loan to the National Gallery from Art Properties Inc, by courtesy of Mr J Paul Getty". But a few years after writing this, Gould was able to show that the picture that hung in the church was now in the Musée Condé in Chantilly. Getty's Raphael was relegated to second league.

Last month, Deborah Gribbon, explaining why the Getty Museum, of which she is director, had bought the Duke of Northumberland's Raphael off the walls of the National Gallery, in such a startling breach of etiquette, was quoted as saying that "we have no Raphael in our collection". They have none, but that does not mean that they have not had one, or indeed more than one, in the past – that Getty himself, and subsequently his museum, have not had some phantom Raphael pregnancies. They are trying for a Raphael, just as they kept trying for a Canova. They long to hear the pitter-patter of tiny Raphael feet. But that doesn't mean they are welcome to take their pick from the cribs in a London maternity ward and go out into the car park with a screaming Raphael under their arm.

Welcome or not, this is what Gribbon has done. In September, the Sotheby's auctioneer Henry Wyndham accompanied the Duke of Northumberland to the National Gallery, where they explained, out of the blue, that they had sold the Raphael for $50m to the Getty Museum, and would be applying for an export licence. Subsequent inquiry confirmed that the deal was done (subject to the licence) and that no rival offer from the gallery could be considered. The pair left, and a sense descended upon Trafalgar Square of having been treated, when all was said and done, shabbily.

Perhaps to allay this sense, Gribbon made clear that the Getty had been offered the painting a year ago by Sotheby's. That offer turns out not to have been the first time that the Getty was approached over the Raphael, and indeed, there is reason to believe that the Duke had been touting his masterpiece elsewhere. At the same time, he was enjoying a government indemnity (that is to say, free insurance while the painting hung in the gallery) of £22m. In addition, his family enjoys immunity from inheritance tax on this, as on other works of art in their collection. We all got the benefit of seeing the Northumberland painting, but the Northumberlands received immense benefits in return.

No museum likes to see a work of art bought off its walls, and it is normally the case that an American museum would tread very carefully before doing anything that might be construed as interfering in the relationship between a donor or a lender to another museum. Now, in the case of the National Gallery, you have to understand, first of all, that it is a different sort of institution from the Getty. The Getty people only seem to think about the Getty, and no doubt that is all well and proper, if somewhat red in tooth and claw. The National Gallery, being a national institution, has to attempt to act in the national interest. From that point of view, Penny's argument was always that the best place for the Northumberland Raphael was in the public rooms at Alnwick Castle, where it could be seen along with the remains of the family's picture collection.

According to this view, the stately homes are the true regional galleries, and every effort should be made to keep their collections intact and accessible. When a great work of art leaves one of these private collections, it sometimes falls to our national institutions to fight to stop the export of the work. Each institution that does so, does so on behalf of the nation. Occasionally, more than one champion has to go out, as Edinburgh and the V&A went out together in the case of Canova's The Three Graces.

When Gribbon observes that, while the Getty has no Raphael, the National Gallery "does have a number of Raphaels", she's right. Excluding the Alnwick painting, there are eight. And these are the eight publicly owned paintings by Raphael in the UK. In addition, there are in the Scottish National Gallery, two or three (depending on your point of view) Raphaels owned by the Duke of Sutherland. That is the full extent of Britain's Raphael patrimony. Eight publicly, four privately owned.

Now, if we look at the US, we find that there, too, there are, depending once again on how you calculate it, a dozen paintings by Raphael. A quarter of these Raphaels were taken from the walls of public collections in Europe, with either Hitler or Stalin acting as facilitator. The deal with Stalin was motivated by the Russian need for foreign currency; the deal with Hitler turned on the Nazi desire to boost public holdings in early German painting.

Apart from these three paintings, the remainder of the Raphaels in America came, directly or indirectly, from British collections. Most came directly. The Getty Museum, in its regular raids on British patrimony, likes to present itself, where possible, as the injured party. But the people at the Getty are the world experts on the provenance of paintings, and they know better than anyone in the world the story that these provenances tell.

I have spoken of patrimony. I might have used the word "heritage". Both terms have defensive connotations, and it is true that countries that are rich enough tend not to fight defensive battles over works of art. They do not need to. We do. And that is why the National Gallery hopes that the government will delay issuing an export licence, while funds are being found. It is not wrong to be on the defensive. The very notion of an old-master painting was traced by Francis Haskell to the late 16th century in Florence, and to a decree of 1602 that forbade the removal from Florence of the works of 18 painters from what was perceived as a golden age. Not all of these painters were Tuscan: Raphael, Titian, Correggio, and Parmigianino were included. Our British patrimony is not only the culture we have enjoyed in common. A great house is saved for the nation, and the public becomes able to enter it for the first time. A masterpiece is found in a corridor, and crowds get their first sight of it when it goes on public display. Our heritage is well defined as that which we should bitterly regret to lose, were we to see it go.

One should not begrudge America its success. I will walk through the Met entranced by the beauty of the objects and the bravura of their display. But sometimes, I will want to stop and spit – not on the memory of those great collectors and patrons, but on the graves of the slippered fools back home who let these masterpieces go. It is not only the Northumberlands of the present, and their eager auctioneers. It is the failures and the complacencies of the past that reproach us, and make us determined to act in this case.

A longer version of this article first appeared in 'The New York Review of Books'