The story
Poland's oldest public museum began in 1796, when Princess Izabela Czartoryska started gathering national relics and Old Masters to keep a sense of Poland alive after the country had been partitioned off the map. Her family's collection is now the star wing of the National Museum in Kraków, and it holds the single most famous painting in the country.
That is Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, painted around 1490. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, the young mistress of the Duke of Milan, and the white ermine she cradles is both a pun on the duke's nickname and a sign of purity. It is one of only a handful of finished portraits Leonardo left. A few rooms away hangs Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan, one of the very few pure landscapes he ever painted.
The collection carries a wound as well. During the German occupation both the Leonardo and a Raphael portrait of a young man were seized for the Nazi leadership. The Leonardo came back in 1945. The Raphael never did, and it remains one of the most valuable paintings still missing from the Second World War, its empty frame sometimes shown in its place. Beyond these headline works the museum spreads across several buildings with Polish painting, arms and armour, and decorative arts, but most visitors climb the stairs for one small panel and the woman holding her ermine.
