A Cultural Touchstone: “Lady with an Ermine”

Howard Zar called his mother from Krakow. Zar, who is executive director of Lyndhurst, a National Trust historic property in Tarrytown, New York, was visiting the Polish city, a place where his mother had once lived, and hidden, during World War II. “As we talked, she’d ask me about a particular corner or store, wondering if a certain bakery was on the street still or if I was walking in the central square.” Later, he told her about a painting he had gone to see at the Czartoryski Museum, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine.” Like many masterpieces, it had vanished during the war, but then was found and is now one of the collection’s most prized items.

Zar’s mother and father were key participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Upon obtaining a false passport and baptismal certificate, she, a Jewish woman, passed herself off as Catholic. In what is one of the most extraordinary stories from the Holocaust, she lived and worked in the Krakow home of an infamous senior SS officer. On Zar’s visit to the city where his mother had managed to survive, he wanted to see what he could of her former life there.

“My husband and I had never been to Poland, and I knew that the Czartoryski is an especially beautiful museum,” Zar recalls of his only visit there in the late 1990s. “I knew this might be the one time in my life I would get to see the Leonardo, unlike my visits to other cities such as Venice, Paris, or London, where I’m able to see familiar works again on subsequent trips.”

While Zar has seen many Leonardo portraits, he emphasizes that “the others don’t make your heart sing the way this one does.” He has yet to forget its “almost Dalíesque surrealist presentation” and the way Leonardo elongated the two figures — a lovely woman and an eerily expressive ermine — in a style that anticipated mannerism. “She and the pet almost share the same facial features. She’s a little more demure and opaque, while the pet is almost more expressive. This is one of those portraits in which the side element, the pet, really takes center stage and makes the whole thing unusual.” The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, who had been the mistress of one of Leonardo’s patrons.

Although Zar claims choosing a famous Leonardo as one of his favorite paintings is “such a cliché,” he does recognize that this work is not only particularly beautiful, clear, and expressive, but also that it represents something far larger in terms of world history and his own family’s: “Great works like this disappeared during the war, hidden in attics and basements, with some never returning. When you go to certain countries, it’s shocking to realize how fragile Western European patrimony and culture are. The journeys of such pieces recall the destruction and the re-establishment of Western culture during and after World War II. Setting aside my mother’s story and my connection to Krakow through her, this painting really is one of the most beguiling works.”

Following World War II, Zar’s parents settled in South Bend, Indiana, where Zar was born and raised. “South Bend barely had a museum, but my parents were very cognizant about taking us to see art museums when we were very young. They had lost part of their culture and their families, and they were desperately trying to recreate it in their kids.”

It makes sense that Zar now makes a living overseeing an 1838 house with a celebrated collection of American and European artworks and artifacts, and also that he sought out a cultural touchstone emblematic of his mother’s past.

The above article was written by David Masello for Fine Art Connoisseur