Bartolommeo Montagna

LEAFING through the British magazine Country Life one quiet afternoon, a priest of London's Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral was struck by a group of photographs. They showed four panels by Bartolommeo Montagna, a minor master of the late 15th century Venetian school. Two of the panels, representing the Angel and the Virgin of the Annunciation, eventually passed into the collection of New College, Oxford. The other two were known only from watercolor copies; the originals had vanished.

The pictures seemed somehow familiar to the priest. He hurried back to the cathedral and dragged into the light two nine-foot panels he remembered having seen there. Blackened and blotched, they were put in the hands of a restorer; slowly two saints emerged from the protective layers of dirt. They corresponded precisely with the copies of the missing Montagnas. By last week the experts happily conceded that the lost panels (opposite page) had been found.

It was clear that the world had regained a magnificent pair of pictures, worthy of the great tradition of Giovanni Bellini, and showing a clarity of form and color foreign to 20th century artists. The question was how they had come to disappear in the first place. They were known to have been in the Duke of Norfolk's collection in 1894, when Westminster Cathedral was still under construction. Presumably he gave them to the cathedral, and they lay forgotten for years in the cavernous fastnesses of Westminster.

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