The Woman with the Silver Badger

The painting known in scholarship as “Lady with an Ermine” is a missing Leonardo da Vinci whose trail connects a Polish collection to wartime concealment and a Swiss bank vault. A reproduction in a book allows March and Charlotte Maguire to recognize that the portrait hidden in the vault is not merely an unidentified treasure: it is a work whose disappearance exposes the gap between the Reich’s records and the history of looted art.

Identity and Documented History

In a book by Professor Arno Braun of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the portrait is reproduced in black and white and identified as one of Leonardo’s most mysterious works. The account dates it to about 1483–86 and says it is believed to depict Cecilia Gallerani, the young mistress of Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan. It cites two early references: a poem by Bernardino Bellincioni, who died in 1492, and an ambiguous remark about an “immature” portrait in a letter Gallerani wrote in 1498.

The book traces the painting into the collection of Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski in the late eighteenth century and notes that it was photographed in Krakau in 1932. After that photograph, its whereabouts become unknown. Braun’s account says the Reich authorities had failed to locate it and feared it was lost forever. That printed description gives Maguire and March a way to connect the portrait in the Swiss vault to a documented history that official searches had not recovered.

The Portrait in the Swiss Vault

After the American visitor has left, Maguire tells March that she has found something and brings him a large coffee-table book she bought on her way back from the airport. Its monochrome reproduction is of the painting they saw in the Swiss bank vault. She recognizes the image, and March reads Braun’s account, which names the portrait and sets out its uncertain wartime fate.

The scene turns on the difference between image and object. The printed page can identify the work and supply a history, but its black-and-white reproduction cannot do justice to the painting itself. The vault’s concealed original and the book’s accessible image together make the portrait legible as evidence: one is physically present but hidden, while the other is publicly described yet records a disappearance.

Connections to Buhler’s Collection

The portrait’s recovery belongs to a larger investigation into art associated with Buhler. At Buhler’s house, March sees wedding photographs in a drawing room furnished with tapestries, carved chairs, and a grand piano. One photograph shows Buhler and his wife beneath an honor guard of SA men; the other shows Buhler bowing as he shakes hands with Adolf Hitler. Those images establish the political setting of a collection whose contents cannot be treated as a neutral private inheritance.

When officials examine the collection, Krebs lists works that include paintings attributed to Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Guardi, and Bellotto, along with eight Canalettos and at least thirty-five engravings by Dürer and Kulmbach. The portrait’s individual provenance sits within this much larger body of art. Krebs identifies the Veit Stoss altarpiece as removed from the Church of Our Lady in Krakau in November 1939; Globus says the collection came mainly from Warsaw and that Buhler recorded works as lost or destroyed. Nebe observes masonry still attached to some panels, physical traces of the monastery and castle walls from which they had been torn. The painting in the vault thus belongs to a story in which missing records, concealed objects, and damaged works all bear on the origins of the collection.

Evidence, Absence, and the Story

The painting’s significance lies in the contradiction between its scholarly visibility and its material disappearance. It had a named subject, a known history of ownership, and a photograph from Krakau, yet the account in Braun’s book could only end with the fear that it was lost to the world. Its appearance in the Swiss vault overturns that conclusion without erasing the years in which its location was concealed.

Maguire calls the discovery a story worth telling and notes that only nine Leonardos are undisputed. The remark gives the portrait both exceptional artistic value and a narrative function: its survival supplies a lead, while its passage from a Polish collection into secret custody points toward the wider crimes surrounding Buhler’s art. The novel makes provenance more than a catalogue of owners; it becomes a way to read what official accounts declared lost, destroyed, or beyond recovery.