Out of the Flea Market

Jesus Martin Benito was a Basque peasant boy who had hoped for fame as an artist. When he failed at that, he turned to art-doctoring, two years ago became one of the eight official restorers in Madrid's museum, the Prado. On the side, he haunted junk shops looking for castoff paintings--cleaning, patching and touching them up for resale at a tidy profit. One day in Toledo's rastro (flea market) he came across a rare find: a filthy five-by-ten-inch scrap of an old painting that looked like an authentic bit of 17th Century canvas. Jesus bought it for 15 pesetas ($1.35).

That night, as Jesus scrubbed away the accumulation of greasy grime, the figure of a 17th Century cavalier gradually emerged, and behind it a flight of marble steps. Fully cleaned, it had all the depth and brilliance of a Velasquez. Jesus could hardly believe his eyes, but when Toledo's museum sent two genuine Velasquez fragments to the Prado for temporary storage, Jesus jubilantly produced his find. The three bits matched perfectly. Apparently they were three parts from the same long-lost Velasquez, which some enterprising art dealer had long ago scissored to sell piecemeal.

Last week the Marques de Lozoya, Madrid's art director, asked Jesus to name his price for the fragment. "Nothing," was the answer. "It brought me adventure. To discover a Velasquez and call it one's own, even for a short time, is enough." Nonetheless, Lozoya pressed a 20,000-peseta ($1,800) reward on Jesus, proposed him for a government decoration. But Jesus was already off to the junk shops again. "If anyone finds more pieces," he declared, "I am the man who should. I have that Velasquez feeling."

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