The Marble Room
Giovanni Battista Gisleni, remodelled by Jakub Fontana; portraits by Marcello Bacciarelli (Bacciarelli 1731 to 1818) · 1640s; remodelled 1771; rebuilt 1971 to 1984
The walls of this room are sheathed in marble of many colours, brown, red, grey and black, framed in gilded bronze, and set into them are twenty two portraits of the kings of Poland in oval frames. Above the fireplace hangs a larger picture, Stanisław August in coronation robes, gazing across at his predecessors. The room was designed as a gallery of the monarchy, a place where the last king placed himself in the line of the Piasts, the Jagiellons and the elected kings, and it is the oldest interior of the state apartment.
The marble decoration goes back to King Władysław the Fourth in the sixteen forties, when the Italian architect Gisleni fitted out the room in the Baroque taste. Stanisław August had it remodelled in seventeen seventy one by Jakub Fontana and commissioned the series of royal portraits from Marcello Bacciarelli, his court painter, who worked from older likenesses and from imagination. Look at the faces: Bacciarelli gave each king a character, from the fierce medieval rulers to the elegant Vasa monarchs, and the sequence ends with the painter's patron in all his glory. The marbles were partly recovered from the ruins after nineteen forty four and reset in the reconstruction.
Above the door and in the frieze the room carries inscriptions in Latin praising the kings, and the whole ensemble was intended to be read as a lesson in the history of the nation. It is a good place to pause before the ballroom, count the portraits and pick out the names you know: Casimir the Great, Jadwiga, Sigismund the Old, John the Third Sobieski who saved Vienna from the Turks. The Marble Room turns the castle into a family album of the Polish state.
Did You Know? Bacciarelli painted all twenty two royal portraits in the room, and for the medieval kings he had almost no reliable likenesses to work from.
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