WARSAW: The Polish government has signed a cut-price deal to buy one of Poland’s greatest private art collections including a rare Leonardo da Vinci portrait, in a bid to keep the collection in the country. Piotr Glinski, the Polish culture minister, hailed the agreement to purchase the Czartoryski Collection for £85 million but immediately ran into a row with the collection’s trustees who questioned the legality of the deal. The vast collection of some 330,000 paintings and artefacts with a total market value estimated at over £1.5bn belonged to Prince Adam Czartoryski, a scion of one of Poland’s leading aristocratic families.
The prince is a descendant of Princess Izabela Czartoryska, who founded the collection 200 years ago, filling it with work of old masters and some of the greatest contemporary names of the day. But the board of the Czartoryska Foundation, which managed the collection before the state purchase, resigned on mass in protest over the deal, claiming the prince had not consulted them before selling the collection for a “fraction of its true value”. It includes works by Rembrandt and Renoir, as well as the centrepiece – da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” – which was painted in 1490 and it is one of only four female portraits produced by the Italian master.
Malgorzata Omilanowska, a former culture minister and a professor of art history, described the cut-price deal as “more nationalisation with compensation than a purchase”. She also questioned whether the prince even had the right to sell the items without the board’s approval and why the government deemed it necessary to spend millions of pounds of tax-payers money on a well maintained collection that is in any case open to the public.
