The Battle of Grunwald
Jan Matejko (1838 to 1893) · 1878
Ten metres wide and more than four metres high, the painting fills an entire wall with a battle so crowded that there is scarcely a patch of sky. In the centre, on a rearing horse and dressed in red, Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania raises his sword. To the left the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Ulrich von Jungingen, in a white cloak with a black cross, is about to be killed by two foot soldiers, one with a spear and one with an executioner's axe. Above them all, small in the top right, King Władysław Jagiełło watches from a hill, and in the clouds Saint Stanislaus prays over the field. It is the fifteenth of July 1410, the day the combined Polish and Lithuanian army destroyed the Teutonic Order near the village of Grunwald.
Matejko painted it in Kraków over three years, at a time when Poland did not exist as a state and its territory was divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Every figure is a portrait of a historical person, researched from chronicles, and every piece of armour and weapon was drawn from real objects. Look for the Tatar archers at the far left, the Bohemian mercenary Jan Žižka with his eye patch, and the tangle of horses, banners and bodies that gives the picture its almost unbearable density. There is no perspective and no empty space; Matejko wanted the viewer to feel inside the fight.
The painting was bought by public subscription and shown in Warsaw in 1902. In 1939 the museum staff hid it from the Germans, who had put a price on its head, by burying it in a crate near Lublin, and it survived the war. Restored again in 2010 for the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, it remains the most famous painting in Poland.
Did You Know? The Germans offered a reward of ten million marks for the painting during the occupation, and the museum workers who buried it never revealed where.
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