The story
Poland's oldest museum began as an act of defiance. In 1796, the year after Poland was wiped off the map and partitioned among its neighbors, Princess Izabela Czartoryska started gathering relics of the vanishing nation and treasures of European art to keep a Polish identity alive in a country that no longer legally existed.
Two of her purchases turned it into a place of pilgrimage. One is Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, a young woman at the Milanese court holding a white ermine, painted around 1490 and among the very few Leonardos in the world. The other was Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan.
A third, Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man, hung beside them until the Second World War, when the Nazis looted the collection. The Rembrandt and the Leonardo eventually came back. The Raphael has never been found, and its empty frame is one of the best-known absences in art.
