MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN.- The exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland” has just opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The story of Poland’s most important public and private museum collections will be presented for the first time anywhere outside of Europe beginning as the Milwaukee Art Museum opens “Leonardo da Vinci and The Splendor of Poland: A History of Collecting and Patronage”. The centerpiece of the collection of 77 paintings representing French, Italian, Dutch and German artists is Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine (Ceilia Gallerani), an undisputed masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. The powerful work also is particularly significant in that it was painted in approximately 1491 and anticipates the Mona Lisa (1505-14). Other exhibition highlights reflect the proud history of collecting in Poland, including a love for the great Dutch and Flemish painters evident in the large numbers of their works found in the national collections, including Hans Memling’s The Last Judgement (1467-71), from Gdañsk.

The collection also includes important Italian Renaissance and Baroque works by artists such as Veit Stoss, Jan Matsys, and Ferdinand Bol, and several 18th century cityscapes of Warsaw by Italian court painter Bernardo Bellotto. Alongside these and numerous other European masters will be a select group of works by great Polish artists from five centuries, including The Great Poland Painter, Jan Matejko, Piotr Michalowski, Olga Boznañska and Jacek Malczewski.
 
The exhibition will highlight Poland’s place in history as a meeting ground for artists and intellectuals of many nationalities; a center for rich and diverse forms of royal patronage incorporating Italian, Netherlandish and French influences; a hub for international trade that produced a pluralism of taste, and a country that clung to its artistic culture in the face of a geopolitical order that shattered its national independence throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries.