LIECHTENSTEIN’S PRINCELY CHARMS

Democracy and technology have made it possible for today’s boys and girls to share a large bag of fantasies about what they are going to be when they grow up. Both can now reach for microbiology and piloting extra-terrestrial vehicles as well as the more standard longings to be cops, firepersons and mayors.

Despite all these salubrious changes, however, nobody seems to manage to reach puberty without being touched by the traditional Cinderella syndrome. Girls still moon on about princes who awaken them with a kiss and whisk them off to live happily ever after. Boys weave silver threads of princely aspiration into their tweedier macho pipe dreams.

The persistence of this syndrome attests to the symbolic power of children’s fairy tales, but it is a little surprising considering that actual princes are in noticeably short supply today, especially in the United States. How are young people supposed to fulfill the Snow White scenario without proper role models?

It’s a real dilemma.

Fortunately, there is relief in sight, at least for anybody able to travel to Manhattan either in fact or daydream by May 1. That is when the Metropolitan Museum of Arts presentation of “Liechtenstein, the Princely Collections” finishes its exclusive appearance in den grossen Apfel .

Now Liechtenstein, of course, is a real place--albeit tiny--gorgeously wedged in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. The principality, created in 1719, is the feifdom of the Princes of Liechtenstein and currently ruled by His Serene Highness the Reigning Prince Franz Josef II von und zu Liechtenstein, whose lineage goes back to the Middle Ages. Historically, the dynasty’s fortunes were linked to those of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire incarnate in Austria, Moravia and Bohemia.

Having absorbed these indications of the actual existence of the Liechtenstein princes, the viewer takes one look at the show and lapses back into dreamland. This is a useful lesson. Princes are real but not quite. They live on that borderland between fact and fiction that is the realm of enchantment. They reinforce this aura of tangible ethereality by surrounding themselves with appropriate art and artifacts. The Liechtensteins have been amassing a collection for centuries and this selection of more than 200 objects does nothing to sully its reputation as the finest thing of its kind in private hands.

The drop-dead centerpiece is a golden carriage. Forget that it was built for Prince Joseph Wenzel as a ceremonial conveyance when he was ambassador to the French court. Ignore its status as the most beautiful French berlin of the Rococo period, designed in 1738 by Nichola Pineau himself. These imposing facts pale to insignificance when we realize that what this really is is Cinderella’s coach before it turned back to a pumpkin. Everything from the entwined golden vines that make up the body to the weightless Boucher-style cherubs painted on the doors tallies exactly with our mental vision of the magic coach waved into existence by Cindy’s fairy godmother’s wand. Except it’s better.

It seems that princes’ reality is superior to ordinary folks’ fantasy. That is impressive but a trifle unnerving. The egalitarian, democratic, populist Yankee within does not like the tweak of inferiority he is feeling and hurries through the galleries to find something at which to go nya, nya, nya.

What about the paintings by Marcantonio Franceschini from the Liechtenstein’s Garden Palace in Vienna? Surely the lowly born iconoclast can have some fun with these scenes from the mythical lives of Diana and Adonis. Aren’t they a trifle kinky to modern eyes, with their pretentious academic manner and vaguely erotic goddesses? Maybe, but the trouble with being an egalitarian Yankee is that one must be fair. Marcantonio was slick but in very good taste.

Apparently princes have excellent taste. In a room devoted to their presence at the court at Prague, taste takes the form of inlaid caskets and table tops that seem to combine elements of folk art. The result is a good taste that elides into actual sensitivity, which then evolves into connoisseurship. The collection of sculpture is a gentlemanly affair heavily into figurative bronzes that exercise the fascination of human anatomy precisely reproduced on a miniature scale.

An equestrian statue of Ferdinando I De Medici appeals equally to the aesthete and the lover of model trains. For truly honed appreciation of fine motor skills there are ivory reliefs by Austrian sculptor Ignaz Elhafen, who could get mobs of gods and noble warriors on a piece of elephant’s tooth smaller than a cigar box.

The prince is playful, refined and has an eye for the delicate detail. Chinese porcelain. Sevres and Meisen. Isn’t there anything wrong with this guy?

Wait. Whatzat? That’s not a real Bacchus by Michelangelo and those aren’t real Roman portrait busts. They are copies by Massimiliano Soldani. The prince is a duffer, a mark and a sucker who buys fakes.

Wrong. By now it is getting to be fairly well known that in the past fine copies of great originals were considered legitimate works in their own right. Evidently these chaps had some capacity for appreciating the intrinsic qualities and associations of a work no matter who its author might be.

A prince is sophisticated. And just in case we might suspect that this urbanity makes him into a sissy and a layabout, the prince brings forth his gun collection. Firearms exercise their usual reptilian fascination here, augmented by superb craftsmanship that makes a pair of wheel-lock pistols look downright graceful. If the prince shoots you, you go out in style.

Now we may be getting down to it. The prince has undeniable virtues but they are cold and ceremonial. Thus far, the exhibition has shown us little beyond the bells and whistles that signal an urbane and self-congratulatory love of objects de luxe . Where are the great works of art that reflect both true artistic cultivation and authentic depth of human feeling?

The prince, the rat, was waiting just beyond the door, ready to spring the good stuff. The prince, the rat, likes a good surprise. Have a nice creamy Ricci or a tangy Mielich, and if you wish to be astonished by understated greatness there is Quentin Massy’s idealistic “Portrait of a Canon.”

If you have tears of delight prepare to shed them among the princely paintings. One, in fact, bears directly upon a recent flap that has been in the news and upon a philosophical issue.

Several noted paintings were recently demoted by scholars because they were found to have been painted by someone other than the renowned person previously thought to be their maker. The most famous of them was “The Man With the Golden Helmet,” now no longer accepted as an original Rembrandt. Cries of wounded sensibility were heard throughout the land and the painting’s estimated value automatically halved. In the present exhibition there is a portrait of one Jan Vermoelen, which is in doubtful repute because the experts can’t decide whether it is by Peter Paul Rubens or Anthony van Dyck.

That’s interesting and it’s nice to have things straight but artistically it doesn’t matter. “Golden Helmet” is still a great painting and the Rubens-Van Dyck conundrum has gone on forever. What matters is intrinsic quality, which the Liechtenstein princes garnered in amounts not available to mere wealth or good luck. They appear to have known what they were doing.

They selected portraits by both Rubens and Van Dyck where the subject’s dark clothing forced the painters to avoid razzle-dazzle and knuckle down on the form with results that come close to realizing corny cliches about life-likeness.

Turn your back on Van Dyck’s “Maria Louisa de Tassis” and the shyly seductive girl may tap you with her feather fan. Any lingering doubts about princely capacity for intimacy and affection must be dispelled by Rubens’ beloved little portrait of a girl. If she was his daughter Clara Serena, that’s nice, but it doesn’t matter.

And just to make sure we remember princely capacity for the grand flourish, the exhibition ends with Rubens’ heroic “Decius Mus Cycle,” the first of those great narrative series that even today leave us wondering at the man’s breadth, energy and imagination.

Painting today just would not contain him. He’d have to be a film impresario. Everything he painted from billowing red robes to magnificent battle horses reeks with vitality. He just never let up so that his heroes’ toes are as intensely realized as their faces. A few stiff youthful passages are more than compensated in panels like “The Obsequies of Decius Mus,” which might well have inspired Delacroix’s “Death of Sardanapalus.”

The exhibition leaves little doubt that being a prince requires an almost impossible combination of virtues. Princes are hard chaps to dislike unless grace and nobility and an aura of unreality put you off. No wonder they are rare. No wonder so many aspiring princesses nap their lives away.