Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Leonardo da Vinci's painting alone is worth more than the price paid for the collection

The Polish government has bought a world-famous art collection, including a rare Leonardo da Vinci painting, for a fraction of its market value. It includes works by Rembrandt and Renoir, as well as the centrepiece - da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine" - which was painted in 1490 and it is one of only four female portraits produced by the Italian master. But the board of the Czartoryska Foundation, which managed the collection before the state purchase, resigned on mass in protest over the deal, claiming the prince had not consulted them before selling the collection for a “fraction of its true value”. The Czartoryski Foundation's management board said it was not consulted about the sale, which was negotiated between Poland's culture ministry and Adam Karol Czartoryski, a descendent of Princess Izabela Czartoryska, who founded the collection in 1802. The collection includes some 86,000 objects, among them da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” and Rembrandt’s “Landscape with the Good Samaritan.” The collection, which also includes some 250,000 books and other library items, has been housed in the private Czartoryski Museum in the southern Polish city of Krakow. There are also 250,000 manuscripts in the collection which has been sold to the nation under an agreement reached between Adam Karol Czartoryski, the descendant of an aristocratic family that gathered the works, and Piotr Glinski, the culture minister and deputy prime minister. The 15th-century portrait of a young woman holding a white ermine, a kind of short-tailed weasel, is one of just four known paintings of women by the Renaissance master.
The Polish government buys the internationally-known Czartoryski collection of art. Based in the city of Kraków and consisting of around 86,000 pieces, this features works by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.