Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, seized in 1939

In the first days of October 1939, a few weeks after Germany invaded Poland, the Gestapo seized a store of art at the Czartoryski palace at Pełkinie, in south-eastern Poland. The Polish Ministry of Culture’s lost-works site gives this account. Among the objects was Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. Other sources tell the autumn of 1939 differently. The Art Newspaper has the Gestapo find the cases at country estates, and the Italian journal Predella has the Germans find them in the museum cellars in Kraków. The sources differ on the route, not on the loss.

Leonardo painted the portrait in about 1489 to 1490, in oil on a walnut panel, 54 by 39 centimetres. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. The ermine alludes to the duke, says the National Museum in Kraków. Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski bought the painting in Italy at some point between 1798 and about 1800, and the sources differ on the date and the seller. It reached Kraków in 1876 and was shown in the Czartoryski Museum from 1878. In August 1939 the family sent its most valuable pieces to Sieniawa. The ministry’s site says the hiding place was plundered on 18 September, but does not say the paintings were taken then.

After the seizure the painting went to Jarosław, where Kajetan Mühlmann, the special commissioner for securing art in occupied Polish territory, was based. By about November 1939 it was probably in Berlin. Hans Posse, a Dresden museum director who bought for Hitler’s planned museum at Linz, reserved it for that collection. In 1940 it hung in the Wawel Castle offices of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor-general of occupied Poland. Frank was convicted at Nuremberg on 1 October 1946 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was executed on 16 October 1946. The ministry’s site says Frank held the painting on deposit. In 1942 it went to Berlin again, and in 1943 Frank’s art adviser, Wilhelm von Palezieux, brought it back to Kraków.

In mid-1944, as the Red Army advanced, the works were moved to Lower Silesia. On 25 January 1945 Frank’s aide-de-camp, Helmut Pfaffenroth, took twenty paintings, among them the Leonardo, to Neuhaus in Bavaria. Frank was arrested there in early May 1945, and the Allies found the painting. It returned to Kraków in late April 1946. The Monuments Men Frank Albright and Everett Parker Lesley were photographed with it, beside the Polish officer Karol Estreicher. Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, taken at the same time, was never recovered and is still missing.

The collection stayed on deposit at the National Museum in Kraków. The ministry says a Polish court confirmed Adam Karol Czartoryski as heir in 1991, and he gave the collection to the Princes Czartoryski Foundation. On 29 December 2016 the Polish state bought it from the foundation. This was a private sale, not an auction, and there was no buyer’s premium. The ministry states that the sum equals 100 million euros at the National Bank of Poland rate of that day, plus 8 percent VAT. Bloomberg gave 104.6 million dollars. The ministry says the price covers about 86,000 museum objects, a library of 250,000 items and the foundation’s claims, including those for wartime losses. The BBC reports that the foundation’s trustees resigned in protest.

The Czartoryski Museum, a branch of the National Museum in Kraków, reopened on 19 December 2019 after a renovation that began in 2010. The Lady with an Ermine is on display there.