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Museums of the Mediterranean
romance as we understand it today. Many alliances, the patient research and some luck their true origin are be-
fruit of painstaking transactions were often brought to ing revealed. Recently the portrait of a little princess
a quick end because of the illnesses and accidents so Inv. (No. 11), long thought to be of Spanish origin and
frequent at the time. which for many years had been attributed to Carreño
de Miranda was found to be one of a pair; her pair —the
These obvious and complex family relationships between portrait of Sigismund Casimir of Poland— happens to be
the different royal houses may to a large extent be iden- part of the Portrait Gallery of the Castle of Ambras in
tified in the paintings of this collection. The portraits Innsbruck, original seat of the Habsburg family, allowing
of these little Princes, whose life seems invested with us thus to reject the Spanish attribution. The Polish ori-
the quality and mystery of legend, survive today as true gin of the Princess is now confirmed and our researches
testimony of their time, translated and reconstructed by have allowed us to identified the author as the Dutch
the vision of the artist. They lead us into an inscrutable painter Pieter, Peeter, or Peter Danckerts de Rij, Dank-
world, a world which moves us and which seems the an- ers de Ry, or Peteris Dankersas, born in Amsterdam in
tithesis of our contemporary preoccupations. The gaze 1605, who died 9 August of 1661. It is actually the por-
of each one of these “Child-Kings” facing their destiny, trait of the daughter of King Ladislao IV of Poland and his
(before being dragged along by events over which they mistress Jadwiga Łuszkowska.
would have little control) seems to ask us profound and
earnest questions. Recently a magnificent portrait of a member of the Bar-
berini family previously attributed to Tiberio Titi, has
The authorship of some of these portraits and the iden- been recognised as being one of the last portraits paint-
tities of some of the sitters still remain unknown. With ed by the great Ottavio Leoni.
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EXPOTIME!, issue October / November 2017
