Mentem mortalia tangunt – Fragments and Fetishes in Puławy Landscape Garden (1794-1831)

Abstract

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, the Duchy of Warsaw’s army, led by Józef Poniatowski through central Poland in 1809, encountered an unusual phenomenon. According to Leon Potocki, a nobleman and author of memoirs: [T]here proceeded numerous citizens of the recently liberated province, in national dress. They carried … marshals’ batons, chancellors’ seals, bishops’ croziers, bunchucks and standards captured from Swedes, Turks, Tatars, and other booty. Then young, handsome white-clad virgins carried on splendid cushions memorabilia of rulers of the Piast, Jagiellon, Vasa dynasties and those enthroned afterwards. In front of them were countesses Matuszewicz and Mir, [who carried] the locks of queen Hedwig d’Anjou taken from her tomb. … A few steps behind there was Princess Izabella Czartoryska advancing with a stern gait. She held the golden key of the Sibyl.1 Meant to impress the army and ensure a peaceful surrender of the ‘liberated province’, this idiosyncratic procession was organized by Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1835, Fig. 1), one of the wealthiest aristocrats and art patrons of Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 The objects in question were drawn from her rich collection, which included Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (Fig. 2) and Raphael’s Portrait of a Youth, and was permanently housed in two pavilions in Puławy. This main seat of the Czartoryski’s princely court and a site of the earliest public art displays in the region (Fig. 3), was open to those who travelled to Izabela’s estate from 1801 until 1831, when the Russian emperor forced the family to flee to Paris.3