Resurrected: lost Raphael painting of Christ

[emad]

John Hooper in Rome
Friday October 15, 2004
The Guardian

An unknown work confidently believed to be by Raphael has been found beneath a later painting which had been put into the wall of an Umbrian church and forgotten.

A banner once paraded by a Catholic lay fraternity shows Christ flanked by St Francis of Assisi and St Ubaldo, the 12th century bishop of Gubbio, the town where it was found.

The secret of its attribution to the Renaissance master lies in a series of gilded monograms worked into the border of the saint's cloak.

They show an R intertwined with a V (the Latin usage for U). Raphael was born in 1483 in the nearby city of Urbino in the Marches, and was known as Raphael Urbinas; he used the same RV device to sign other paintings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1327915,00.html
Sorry no pic yet