THE QUEEN WANDA MYTH IN GRAPHIC ARTS IN 16th-19th CENTURY

• Authors: Widacka H.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The dramatic fate of the legendary Polish queen, Wanda, daughter of King Krak (Grakch), the ruler of Cracow, was reflected in iconography that includes portraits and historical scenes depicting the heroine's death and the recovery of her body from the Vistula river. The earliest images are the anonymous wood engravings in Maciej Miechowita's 'Chronica Polonorum' (1521) and in Marcin Bielski's 'Polish Chronicle' (1597) as well as two copperplates by Tomasz Treter ('Reges Poloniae' or the so-called Treter's Eagle, 1588, and another that is part of the 'Regum Poloniae Icones' series, published in 1591), copied by various European publishers (Arnold Mylius, 1594; Salomon Neugebauer, 1620). From 1852 comes a two-colour lithograph 'The Royal Castle and the shades of Krakus and Wanda' made in Lvov by Teofil Zychowicz and printed there at Marcin Jabłonski's factory. It was based on Michal Stachowicz's mural made between 1819 and 1821 at the Archbishops of Cracow Palace (destroyed by a fire in 1850). Between 1844 and 1946 in Paris a Lvov painter, Korneli Szlegel, painted an oil depicting Wanda's death and made two lithographs from it. In Warsaw, Aleksander Lesser painted 'The Death of Wanda' (1855), a painting that became a model for a tableau vivant presented on the stage of 'Teatr Wielki' in Warsaw in 1871, a wood engraving illustration of which (drawing by Lesser, engraving by Andrzej Zajkowski) was published by the Warsaw 'Klosy' in 1871. Probably the most popular among all those images was an oil painting by Maksymilian Antoni Piotrowski 'The Death of Wanda' (1859), copied by the author himself (with the copy now in the Museum of the Opole Silesia in Opole) an popularised by a two-colour lithograph printed at the Winckelmann & Sons press in Berlin under the imprint of Daniel Edward Friedlein from Cracow. This faithful though anonymous copy was subsequently included in Lucjan Siemienski's 'Album of Polish painters at the Exhibition of the Friends of Fine Arts Society in Cracow' (1860). The are no distinguished works among the graphic depictions of Wanda; similarly, there are no important Polish and foreign names among their authors (with the majority of works remaining anonymous).

Keywords

EN

16-19TH C.); BOOK ILLUSTRATION (POLAND; ICONOGRAPHY; WANDA - LEGENDARY POLISH QUEEN

Discipline

• LIBRARY_&_INFORMATION_SCIENCE: LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Roczniki Biblioteczne
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 51
• Pages: 85-101
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Widacka H.

• H. Widacka, Biblioteka Narodowa, al. Niepodleglosci 213, 00-973 Warszawa, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

08PLAAAA03707458