The Knights' Hall
Domenico Merlini, sculptures by André Le Brun, paintings by Marcello Bacciarelli (Le Brun 1737 to 1811) · 1781 to 1786; rebuilt 1971 to 1984
A bronze figure of Chronos, the god of time, bends under the weight of a globe that is also a clock, and opposite him Fame raises a trumpet to announce the glory of Poland. Between them, on the walls of this long room, hang six large paintings of the great moments of Polish history and, in gilded frames, the portraits of twenty two famous Poles, from scholars and poets to generals. This is the Knights' Hall, designed for Stanisław August as a national pantheon, a room in which the past was meant to teach the present.
Look at the paintings by Bacciarelli. They show the founding of the university of Kraków, the union of Poland and Lithuania at Lublin, the treaty with the Teutonic Knights, the liberation of Vienna by John Sobieski and other scenes chosen by the king himself to illustrate wise government rather than mere battle. The bronze sculptures of Chronos and Fame were cast by André Le Brun, whose work you will meet again in the ballroom. The clock in the globe still runs. The portraits in the frieze were painted by Bacciarelli's workshop and include Copernicus, who was one of the king's heroes.
The hall was completed in seventeen eighty six and served as an antechamber to the Throne Room, so that anyone approaching the king walked through a lesson in national history first. It was destroyed in nineteen forty four along with the rest of the castle; the bronzes had been hidden and survived, and the paintings had been removed in nineteen thirty nine, which is why so much of what you see here is original. The programme of the room, history as a school of citizenship, was an idea of the Enlightenment that Stanisław August took very seriously.
Did You Know? The clock carried by the bronze figure of Chronos still keeps time, a reminder that the hall was about history and its passing.
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