In a coincidence ordained as if by celestial design, two great masterworks of European painting are joined again temporarily in New York after traveling from their permanent home in the Czech Republic. Although the works appear here in different venues, they are exhibited a scant few blocks apart. Titian’s monumental late Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1575) strikes the opening, sonorous chord in the provocative “Unfinished” exhibition arranged in the newly configured Met Breuer. It greets the visitor in the show’s first gallery with its shocking imagery and almost phosphorescent surface. A short walk away at the Frick Collection hangs the magnificent double portrait Charles I and Henrietta Maria Holding a Laurel Wreath (1632) by Anthony Van Dyck. While not as arresting and dramatically displayed as the Titian, the work easily stands out in the fine and comprehensive exhibition “Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture.”¹

The two paintings were first brought together towards the end of the seventeenth century by Karl IIvon Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn, a cultured and worldly prelate who spent the last thirty years of his ecclesiastical career as Prince-Bishop of Olomouc in Moravia. As a result of Swedish Protestant occupation in the 1640s, the Bishop moved his residence and collections to the Archiepiscopal Palace in the smaller and more remote town of Kromeriz where they