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In 1974 the American arts administrator Michael Straight donat-ed the portrait of Giovanni Borgherini and his Tutor [Fig. 1] to the National Gallery in Washington.1 Attributed to Giorgione by Vasari, who saw it in the house of Borgherini's heirs in Florence, the double portrait depicts the boy and his tutor in a half-length format. A distracted young Borgherini, on the left, looks out at the viewer, while the tutor, shown approaching from the right, proffers an armillary sphere and points to a scroll bearing a Latin inscription. Despite Vasari's testimony, the canvas has long been an attributional conundrum: the concept is original, but the exe-cution-or what we see of it-is manifestly not by Giorgione.2
At the time of the donation, Straight was serving as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Scion of the wealthy Whitney family, he edited their left-leaning magazine, The New Republic. He also wrote a handful of novels, as well as a play about Caravaggio, and even tried his hand at painting. In an interview Straight described himself as'primarily an artist who was drawn to politics in times of crisis'.3 Politics indeed. Facing a background check for federal employment, Straight admitted to the FBI and the British Secret Service that he had belonged to the notorious Cambridge espionage ring of the 1930s. His confession was crucial to exposing Anthony Blunt, who had recruited him to the Communist cause. Later, in his memoir, After Long Silence, Straight publicly acknowledged that he had been a Soviet agent.4 More of an apologia than an auto- biography, his account was challenged, a year after his death, in a 2005 biography entitled Last of the Cold War Spies.5 Drawing on declassified Russian documents, his biographer claimed that Straight continued to work for the Soviets long after returning to the United States. Whatever the case, both books focus on Straight's culpability to the detriment of his other interests and activities. They practically ignore his vocation as a collector, and yet that side of him deserves to be better known. With his papers off limits at Cornell University until 2017, I have turned, in investigating Michael Straight's Giorgione, to the extensive correspondence about the picture kept at the Gallery with a detailed inventory of the artworks...