Dimensions: 111.5 × 85.5 cm
purchase, 1961
Inv. no. MP 312 MNW
Adoption period: 1 year
Biography
The portrait depicts King Stanislaw August Poniatowski at the end of his reign. It was created at the time when Russia and Prussia were carrying out the Second Partition of Poland (the Partition Agreement was concluded on January 23, 1793), following the Republic's defeat in the defensive war and the overthrow of the May 3 Constitution.
The ruler is portrayed in accordance with the sophisticated iconographic canons of the era, as an Enlightenment homme des lettres: in the privacy of his study, in homely attire - a robe (which further signifies the reduction of the monarch's distance from his subjects). He is accompanied by props of clever, erudite eloquence (a globe in the background, an hourglass on the table, which is surrounded by a royal crown). These have been the subject of much scientific analysis.
The portrait was made according to the concept of the monarch himself. He called it an "allegorical portrait," and at the ruler's request it was reproduced in many replicas and copies of paintings and engravings, which the king distributed to family members and prominent political figures. The engravings, made according to this portrait, also found their way to the European courts of the rulers.
The portrait is a kind of ideological "testament" of Stanislaw Augustus. The painting visualized to viewers the spiritual suffering of the ruler in the face of the misfortunes that afflicted Poland and was intended to justify his unpopular political decisions. Making viewers aware of the monarch's despair is served, among other things, by the reference to Dido, the mythical queen of Carthage. An allusion to her is the inscription Quaesivit coelo Lucem (She looked for the light in the sky), visible on the table's doorjamb, taken from Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. Below this inscription on the profile strip Bacciarelli immortalized in majuscule the royal names and titles and the year of the work's creation MLCCXXXXIII, and even lower he added his own signature with the monthly date (Aprilis).
The painting from the MNW is the only version of this portrait, out of nineteen known paintings, signed by the artist. It is the most harmonious in terms of composition, painterly elaboration and rendering the majesty of the monarch, sensing the end of his reign.
Marcello Bacciarelli is considered a precursor of the national school of Polish painting. In addition to numerous portraits of King Stanislaw August, his family, and representatives of the Polish aristocracy, he left behind, among others, a series of "Poczetkról Polski" in the Marble Room of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, as well as paintings of historical and mythological subjects at the Castle and other royal residences.
