Princes Czartoryski Museum

When Princess Izabela Czartoryska’s collection fled Poland after the failed 1830 uprising against Russian rule, it spent four decades in Parisian exile at the Hôtel Lambert. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War forced the Czartoryskis to pack up their Leonardo and Rembrandt in 1871, and by 1876 they had returned home. The city of Kraków offered them the old Arsenal and a former Piarist monastery, which Viollet-le-Duc’s son-in-law Maurice Ouradou transformed into a Neo-Gothic museum complex linked by a brick archway. Today that bridge still connects the past to the present, quite literally.

Among the pieces that made the round trip was the Lady with an Ermine, one of only four surviving female portraits by Leonardo, who painted Cecilia Gallerani, mistress to the Duke of Milan, without any inkling she would spend the next five centuries changing addresses more often than the family that owned her portrait. During the Second World War she was requisitioned by Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, who displayed her in his office at Wawel Castle for about a year, as though proximity to a masterpiece might improve the view. She came home again in 1946. In 2016 the Polish state simply bought the whole collection outright, for roughly one hundred million euros, closing a saga that began with a princess smuggling paintings past the Russians and ended with a government writing a check. The archway over Pijarska Street, for its part, has never had to go anywhere.