The Jagiellonian Tapestries
Brussels workshops after designs by Michiel Coxcie and others (mid sixteenth century) · about 1550 to 1560
The tapestries hanging throughout the State Rooms are the greatest treasure of Wawel and one of the finest Renaissance tapestry collections in the world. King Sigismund Augustus, the last of the Jagiellonian dynasty, ordered them from Brussels in the middle of the sixteenth century, and at its height his collection numbered around three hundred and sixty pieces. About one hundred and thirty seven survive, and they fall into three groups: large Biblical scenes, playful animal and landscape pieces known as verdures, and heraldic tapestries with the royal monogram and the arms of Poland and Lithuania.
Look at the detail shown here, from the tapestry of the Flood. Water rushes across the composition, a man hauls a woman onto a rock, and in the background the ark rides the waves. The weavers used wool for the bulk of the picture, silk for the highlights on skin and fabric, and threads wrapped in gold and silver for the richest passages, which is why the tapestries shimmer under good light. Borders full of fruit, grotesque masks and strapwork frame each scene. The animal tapestries are just as remarkable, with lions, dragons, ostriches and creatures the designers had never seen but imagined from travellers' tales.
The king left the tapestries to the nation in his will, a rare gesture in an age when royal property was normally private. They were carried off to Russia after the partitions of Poland, returned in the nineteen twenties, then evacuated by river and sea in September nineteen thirty nine, spending the war and its aftermath in Canada. They came home in nineteen sixty one. Because light damages them, the museum rotates the display, so no two visits show exactly the same set.
Did You Know? The tapestries spent more than twenty years in Canada after being smuggled out of Poland in nineteen thirty nine, and did not return until nineteen sixty one.
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