Rocznik Historii Sztuki

The article discusses the history and architecture of the villa of the bishop of Krakow, Piotr Myszkowski, in Książ Wielki, built in the years 1585–1595 by the Florentine sculptor and architect, Santi Gucci. The entire residential complex is classified by researchers as one of the most important types of developments in the 16th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The idea of a gallery of illustrious Poles, usually associated with the Knight’s Hall at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (1781–1786), began to take shape in the 1770s. In the face of political crisis and deep social divisions, King Stanisław August developed a program of presenting exemplary figures from Polish history. Portraits accompanied by biographical accounts, assembled within the royal collections, were intended to serve as didactic instruments and vehicles for fostering patriotic sentiment. The pantheon of distinguished compatriots thus emerged as a central component of the monarch’s artistic and political patronag

The aim of this article is to present the lost portrait of Aniela Konstantowa Zamoyska, née Potocka, by Jan Matejko. Completed in 1872 and presented twice to the general public at exhibitions at the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the painting represents a period in Matejko’s oeuvre when the artist departed from the realistic presentation of models. Fearing the approaching front, the work was transported in 1944 from the Zamoyski Palace in Kozłówka to the Brzozowski Palace in Warsaw, where it was destroyed during the war. Fortunately, a black and white photograph from 1872, a glass negative made after 1923, a print in the so-called Matejko Album and a recently found copy of the painting by Florian Cynk (?). This article summarises currently available sources and outlines the countess’s biography, including a correction of the year of her birth, which has so far been given incorrectly.

The aim of this article is to discuss graphic subscription campaigns announced in the Polish daily press in Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius, Lviv, Poznań, and Toruń during the 1930s. The mechanism of advance payment, employed in Europe since the 16th century for luxurious, often richly illustrated book publications, became in interwar Poland one of the key methods of distributing and popularizing graphic art among a broad audience. It developed on an unprecedented scale, as evidenced by 36 subscription campaigns organized between 1933 and 1941, which brought together nearly 150 printmakers. Subsequent editions, based on the principles established during the first initiative – launched by the woodcutter Wiktor Podoski and Stanisław Piasecki, editor of the Warsaw daily “ABC” – were frequently adapted to local conditions and refined through accumulated experience. The examples discussed reveal a phenomenon of multifaceted significance: breaking down barriers between artists and their audiences, ensuring mass access to affordable works of art, shaping public taste, promoting patriotic themes and motifs in a state rebuilding its national identity, and, finally, integrating and supporting local graphic art communities. The study further demonstrated that, as a result of the subscription campaigns, a new group of recipients emerged, not necessarily identical with the print collectors already active in the art market.

The article examines Ewa Garztecka’s short story Realism as a literary portrayal of the French painter André Fougeron, concealed under the fictional name Michel Hussenet. Through the lens of literary fiction, Garztecka encodes autobiographical experiences and a personal relationship with the artist, whom she encountered within the leftist Italian art milieu of the 1940s. A detailed analysis reveals parallels between Fougeron’s biography and Hussenet’s character, identifying the real painting The Young Polish Woman as a pivotal reference in the narrative. The study reconstructs the political and artistic contexts surrounding both Garztecka’s prose and Fougeron’s oeuvre, highlighting tensions between the ideological demands of socialist realism and the artists’ personal and aesthetic pursuits. The deliberate blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction serves as a subtle form of political critique and a means of preserving the memory of a marginalized history.

Artykuł jest poświęcony Państwowemu Przedsiębiorstwu „Desa” – Dzieła Sztuki i Antyki, monopoliście w obrocie sztuką i antykami w czasach Polski Ludowej. Autor analizuje okoliczności jego powstania, przemiany, rozwój, a także społeczną recepcję na przestrzeni czterdziestu lat istnienia. Stawia tezę, że mimo prowadzenia z pozoru neutralnej działalności handlowej było projektem politycznym, realizującym w zakresie obrotu dzieł sztuki i ochrony dóbr kultury oficjalną politykę państwa. Jednocześnie ze względu na unikatową ofertę, a także społeczną ekskluzywność stało się przestrzenią dystrybucji prestiżu.

This article examines the experience of sculpture in Herder’s aesthetic writings. I situate it in the space between visual, haptic, and linguistic perception. At the center of attention is the distinctive descriptive language built around an “as if” structure. I argue that, despite the evident valorization of the hand, Herder’s experience of sculpture—and the “living concept” bound up with it—cannot be reduced to a single sense. The exemplary Pygmalion from Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume ultimately does not touch the sculpture with his hand but with a brush. Yet, because the experience involves individual knowledge of the properties of matter and bodies, it apprehends sculpture differently than objects perceived solely by the eye.