Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from National Gallery looking at Jan Matejko’s role in the Polish arts and crafts movement, Young Poland. This was organised to compliment the current display of Jan Matejko’s “Copernicus” and Julia Griffen, curator of an exhibition at the William Morris Gallery on the Polish Arts and Crafts Movement took us through the artist’s career looking both at his paintings and his decorative work. She outlined the role of Matejko’s pictures at a time when Poland didn’t exist and how he used them to create a pantheon of national figures. She also looked at how the discovery of the tomb of King Casimir and the ancient crown jewels fed into this. She then went on to look in some detail at his work to de-Baroque St Mary the Virgin Cathedral in Krakow and to design a new Gothic interior. She had wonderful slides of the designs and the finished work, She also looked at how he influenced his main student, Stanislaw Wyspianski, Poland’s equivalent of William Morris.

Neat exhibition at the National Gallery of Polish artist, Jan Matejko’s iconic painting of Copernicus. This picture is on loan from Kraków's Jagiellonian University founded in the 14th century. I knew nothing about this picture but quickly learned from the excellent commentary that this picture is an icon of Polish art bringing together the famous 19th century Polish artist, Jan Matejko and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who I’d not realised was Polish, or from an area now part of Poland. The picture shows Copernicus presenting his discovery, that the earth moves round the sun, to God on the roof of the university. He is surrounded by the scientific instruments he would have used and it was a lovely touch to show the picture alongside contemporary examples of those instruments from the university which belonged to an earlier astronomer and were almost certainly used by Copernicus. There was also a 1543 copy of his publication “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”.   Closes ...