Within the framework of a loan, there will be an exchange between Italy and Polland.
This will concern Raffaello's «Velata» and Tiziano's «Venere di Urbino», which will leave the Uffizi to be exhibited in Varsavia.
On the other side one of the most beautiful and unknown paintings of Leonardo's will begin its three months exhibition in Italy: the «Dama con l'ermellino», usually kept in the Czartoryski Museum in Cracovia.
The painting, realized on an extremely thin walnut table, was purchased by the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski in the year 1800, during his travel to Italy.
He then donated it to his mother Isabel, who was working to the creation of the first national Polish museum in Pulawy.
The portrait of the «Dama» was painted by Leonardo during his stay in Milan around the years 1489/90, basing on the most recent studies, and it represents a sort of «manifest» of the theorical reflections of the artist during those years.
The bright movement of the woman's head, opposing to the body, seems to reflect, as if it were a snapshot, the «motion of the soul» of the portrayed person, revolutionizing the static typologies of the conventional portray.
Leonardo conducts his research into the existing ralationship between the motion of the «soul» and that of the body, between inwardness and outward appearance, detecting with great modernity the psychological principle that superintends the action.
The portrayed person seems likely to be Cecilia Gallerani, a striking highly placed person of the court of Milan, friend of poets and man of letters and poet herself.
Here she is portrayed when she was just an adolescent, at the time she was having her love affair with Ludovico il Moro, duke of Milan, who most probably ordered the painting to Leonardo, the artist of his court at that time.
The ermine, carried by Cecilia in her arms, hides, under the naturalistic aspect, complex symbols alluding to Ludovico himself (conferred of the title on the Ordine dell'Ermellino in 1488), or even to the virtue of «measure» which reminds of the ideas of «kindness» and «gentleness».
The new and revolutionary way of representing the human face, created in the painting of Cracovia, is put in evidence by the violent use of light, which sprinkles the image coming from the right.
This is now intensified by the black background, which is not the original one, but just the result of a nineteenth-century restoration.
The ancient background should be in fact a mixture of grey and blue, as inferred by the accurate scientific analysis made at the National Gallery of Washington in 1992.