Da Vinci's lady with ermine is described on the web as having been bought by a
Polish prince for his mother. She wasn't best pleased, objecting that the
animal didn't look much like a dog. Apparently-this is beyond my expertise- it
doesn't resemble an ermine either. It's more a reference to the ermine's
heraldic meaning, which is to say that the bloke whose mistress was being
depicted had some sort of ermine family connection. As one does.
The giftee immediately commissioned an artist to paint over the
background--black is such an arty color-- and to maybe adjust the hand. The
result, if you look, is that the hand is not only longer than her face, it's
longer than her foreshortened forearm.
We couldn't figure out what the line at the eyebrows is about. There's no
comparison to the experience of visiting the Mona Lisa. The lady with the
Ermine sits alone in the dark. It costs very little to see her. Photography
is not allowed, so you are spared all that flashing. And when we went the
experience was, as reported in reviews, quite uncrowded.
The rest of the web account is about how the Germans were destructive of Polish
cultural heritage. By Polish cultural heritage is meant an Italian painting
that someone Polish bought circa 1800. This reminds me of claims to sacred
hunting grounds in the Black Hills, which the Lakota took from the Crow at
about the same time. No doubt there are complexities that I'm ignorant of.
Anyway, the Nazi commandant of Kraków stole this and another famous painting.
They haven't found the second one yet so, at least until recently, there was an
empty frame on the wall opposite. The account here
https://www.leonardodavinci.net/lady-with-an-ermine.jsp closes with the ;
accusation that an S S soldier stepped on the art. How you can tell from a
boot print that the SS were culpable, and not some other oaf, is the sort of
thing an expert could reveal.
There is a level of very black humor in discovering that it's cheaper to go to
Auschwitz than down the salt mines. River rafting is more expensive yet. But
we're not doing that. Some of us want to see salt mines.
Below our hotel room balcony in Gdansk, the Black Pearl left about once an hour
for the Second World War. If you think it's odd that a mythical pirate ship,
powered by diesel, takes people to where World War Two started ...well yes it
is. Even odder is the fact that a fight that lasted six days, resulted in
fifteen Polish casualties and fifty German ones (approx) is swarmed by huge
numbers of Polish tourists, all in search of heroism. The monument is huge.
Written on it are la Manche ( what the French call the channel), Dunkirk,
several other names and Westerplatte. When I get home I'm going to search for
a DVD I bought at the library a while back. It's one of several films made
about this fight.
Spent a morning in the Gdansk World War Two museum, which is way more popular
than art with a half an hour queue for a ticket! It's built underground so
you can explore buried memories. It's emotionally awful, with film of
executions and other horrors. Families with young children wandered through.
Women were interviewed about what Soviet liberators did. No narrative is
free of politics but the finish here was a big surprise, a video game
projected onto a huge screen above the exit. In it Poles were winning the
Second World War.
