"A history in pictures: a traveling exhibition of major art works from Polish collections opens a door to the country's tumultuous political past - Report From Milwaukee - Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland

Art in America, Feb, 2003 by Franz Schulze

While the genre of exhibition commonly called a "masterpiece show" is likely to pull in the crowds, more than attendance numbers are required to attract lasting attention. The Milwaukee Art Museum has had the good fortune--founded on good sense--to assemble a traveling exhibition, "Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland," that originated with the pursuit of a single painting and ended as something far broader and, from a scholarly as well as a public standpoint, distinctly more memorable.

Six years ago Laurie Winters, the museum's curator of early European painting, began work on an exhibition built around Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani), ca. 1490, a portrait that had held a special place in her affections and in her previous teaching experience. Since the painting hung in a museum in Cracow, several trips to Poland seemed warranted, in the course of which she learned considerably more than she had expected about the background of the country's art collections. Conversations with directors and curators gradually led her to expand the scope of her projected show to an examination of the history of Polish art, collecting and patronage from the 15th century onward. She was further motivated by the recollection that art history as an academic and museological discipline in the United States did not get into high gear until after World War II, by which time the Cold War had left much of the record of Eastern European art beyond the American ken. Since virtually none of the existent literature was written in English, the table was set for an exhibition that would provide Americans with unexampled instruction in Poland's artistic past. Milwaukee seemed an ideal setting for such an exhibition, since a large number of people there--and an even greater percentage in Chicago, 90 miles south--trace their ancestry to Poland. The result of her effort was presented in the museum's spectacular Quadracci Pavilion, designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and completed in 2001. Seventy-seven of the foremost works in Polish collections are accompanied by a catalogue that features contributions by nearly 40 authors, most of them Polish.

Much of the writing is devoted to the tumultuous political history of Poland, including the depredations the country endured over long periods at the hands of militarily stronger powers like France, Russia, Germany and 17th-century Sweden following the imperialistic reign of Gustavus Adolphus. Between 1795 and 1918, during which time Poland as a sovereign power ceased to exist, Polish art possessions suffered accordingly. Nonetheless, patrons persisted in their efforts to preserve what they could, and in this respect the Leonardo portrait, with a long and complicated history, took on vivid symbolic meaning.

Lady with an Ermine was purchased in Italy at the turn of the 19th century by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski for his mother, Izabela Czartoryska, who installed it in a museum that she had founded at the family residence in Pulawy and opened to the public in 1809. Although the Czartoryski estates were confiscated by the Russians following a Polish uprising in 1830, friends of Mme. Czartoryska managed to rescue the painting and move it to the town of Sieniawa, where it was kept secure. It was later sent to Paris for further safekeeping and did not return to Poland until Izabela's grandson, Wladyslaw, opened the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Cracow in 1876. Almost a half-century had passed since the work was removed from Poland.

The story does not end there. During World War II, the painting was seized by the Nazis, transported to various locales and, following Germany's defeat, restored in 1946 to Cracow, where it has hung ever since. The Poles have associated their national aspirations with the convoluted route the painting has traveled, and it is now as much a national icon--in Winters's words, "an enduring symbol of survival"--as it is an artistic treasure.

The latter identity is most obviously in evidence in the current show. Though modest in size at 21 3/8 by 15 1/2 inches, the painting easily dominates the exhibition. The palette is subdued but elegant, the countenance of the subject surpassingly comely. This is Leonardo at his most lyrically compelling. The closest rival in importance is a triptych, The Last Judgment (1467-71), by Hans Memling. Unusually large for that artist, it is a masterfully composed, iconographically complex work that has not been seen before in America. Like the Leonardo, this painting has a rather remarkable history. In 1473, during the Fourteen Years' War between England and the Hanseatic League, it was seized by a pirate ship out of Gdansk while it was en route from the Netherlands to the church of Badia Fiesolana in Florence. It was taken directly to the church of St. Mary in Gdansk. In spite of protests by the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold and Pope Sixtus IV, Gdansk refused to give it up. Napoleon, however, claimed it as spoils in 1807. After his downfall, the Prussians took it briefly, returning it to Gdansk in 1816. During World War II, it was lost to the Germans, later retrieved by the Red Army and, in 1956, brought back to the National Museum in Gdansk.