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Private Leonardo. Liechtenstein also has considerable faith in its wine, a sturdy rose that the government refuses to export for fear of running dry. An even more jealously guarded national treasure is Franz Josef's family art collection (TIME, Dec. 12, 1960), which consists of 1,500 paintings valued at $150 million. It includes the only Leonardo da Vinci in private ownership, a lush portrait of a Florentine maiden called the Ginevra dei Benci, as well as 27 Rubens paintings that are valued at $11 million, and paintings by Van Dyck, Brueghel, Rembrandt and Botticelli. The public is allowed to see only 75 of Franz Josef's lesser pictures, which are sandwiched into a modest building in Vaduz along with the tourist office and the national postage-stamp museum. The closest the Liechtenstein family comes to sharing its greatest paintings with the world is allowing them to appear occasionally on one of the nation's famed postage stamps.
Despite postwar losses of vast holdings in Communist Czechoslovakia, Franz Josef II is ranked among Europe's ten richest men. A grandnephew of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination at Sarajevo ignited World War I, the alert, easygoing prince is also rated Liechtenstein's most popular monarch since Johannes the Good, who took the throne in 1858, reigned 71 years,* and spent an impressive $18 million of his personal fortune to build schools and roads in Liechtenstein. Though no one expected Franz Joseph to spend as much, loyal Liechtensteiners who crowded into the palace last week prayed lustily that the prince and his beautiful, 41-year-old wife, Princess Gina, might reign as long as Johannes. "When the personality cult goes," murmured one devoted bystander, "Liechtenstein goes too."
*Longer than any other European monarch save France's Louis XIV, who beat him by a year.