Jerzy Malinowski, Irina Gavrash
Polish Institute of World Art Studies; Nicolaus Copernicus University of Torun, Poland; University of Gdansk, Poland
The roots of the inspirations with the Renaissance painting in Polish art are related to the activities of the artistic colony in Rome formed around 1820. In the center of interest was mainly the work of Raphael, to which Wojciech Korneli Stattler referred when he created The Maccabees (1830–1842), the most important patriotic and symbolic painting of Polish Romanticism. In the next generation,
Henryk Rodakowski alluded in historical scenes and portraits (e.g. Portrait of Leonia Bluhdorn) to the Venetian Renaissance (Titian and Veronese), creating an idealistic concept of beauty, expressed in the style defined as “a sense of grandeur combined with simplicity”. Jan Matejko chose a different way to hark back to the Renaissance, presenting “focal” moments of the Polish history in the 16th century (Prussian homage), symbolically reaching for the splendor of the forms of Venetian painting. A strong trend of the inspiration with the Renaissance developed around 1870 in the circle of the Polish colony in Munich. A mood of poetic dream, combined with the motifs of the Renaissance architecture and costumes appeared in the painting of Adam Chmielowski, whose attention was drawn to BÖcklin and Feuerbach (The Italian siesta). Similarly, with Aleksander Gierymski, the inspiration with Titian (in The Italian siesta) led to a new color structure of the painting, with an analogy to Impressionism. In the early 20th century, the work of classicizing artists like Eugeniusz Zak drew on Leonardo (portraits), Botticelli (idyllic scenes, like The Bather). Quattrocento appealed to Waclaw Borowski in the polychromy in the church in Miloslaw. These artists formed an interwar group “Rhythm”, which was the last major one to reveal links with the art of the Renaissance. One of its members was Ludomir Slendzinski, a graduate of the Academy of St. Petersburg, whose official propaganda works reflected the reference to the patterns of the early Renaissance and Roman motifs of that time.