Stańczyk
Jan Matejko (1838 to 1893) · 1862
A jester in a red costume with bells sits slumped in a chair, chin on his hand, staring into nothing. Behind him a door opens onto a brightly lit ballroom where the court is dancing, but he has turned his back on it. On the table beside him lies a letter, and if you read the paper you can make out the news: the fortress of Smolensk has fallen to the Muscovites. It is 1514, and Stańczyk, the court fool of King Sigismund the Old, is the only person at the ball who understands what the loss means for Poland. A comet burns in the night sky through the window.
Matejko was twenty four when he painted this, and he gave the jester his own face; the heavy features and long jaw are unmistakable, and he used the figure of Stańczyk again and again as a kind of alter ego, the wise fool who sees the truth while the powerful dance. Look at the cap with its bells, painted so carefully that each bell catches the light, and at the hands, one clenched in the lap, the other supporting the head. The strong contrast between the dark foreground and the glowing ballroom is theatrical and deliberate, and the red of the costume against the green of the wall makes the figure jump forward.
The picture was painted a year before the January Uprising of 1863 against Russian rule, and its mood of foreboding was understood at once by Polish viewers. It has become one of the best known images in Polish culture, endlessly reproduced and parodied. Many visitors expect to find it in Kraków, Matejko's home city, but it has belonged to the Warsaw museum since 1924 and hangs here among his other works.
Did You Know? Matejko gave Stańczyk his own face, and painted himself as the jester at least three more times in later pictures.
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