The story
In the picture gallery of the Archbishop's Palace in Kroměříž, a town in Moravia, hangs a double portrait by Anthony van Dyck, court painter in London, of King Charles I of England and his queen, Henrietta Maria, from the early 1630s. Less than two decades later the king had been executed and his pictures were sold off across Europe. The collection around this portrait grew out of that upheaval.
In 1673 Karl von Liechtenstein-Castelcorno, Prince-Bishop of Olomouc, paid 30,000 guilders for the paintings of the Imstenraedt brothers, collectors in Cologne. Much of their collection had come from the estate of the Earl of Arundel, a great English collector, and from the sale of Charles I's paintings. The bishop's purchase brought the gallery its most famous work, Titian's Flaying of Marsyas, one of the last paintings of the Venetian master's life. It shows the satyr hung upside down by his feet while Apollo's knife does its work, painted in the loose, broken brushwork of Titian's old age.
Today the palace and its gardens are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the Archdiocesan Museum Kroměříž, part of the Olomouc Museum of Art, runs the gallery of some 580 paintings, including Lucas Cranach's Martyrdom of Saint Catherine. Down the corridors is the Rococo Assembly Hall, where Miloš Forman filmed scenes of Amadeus as a stand-in for imperial Vienna.
