Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The name of the artist and stage decorator Konstanty Ottosielski (Otoszelski, ca 1755–1809) is well known among culture historians, with brief biograms being included in biographical dictionaries of Lithuania’s and Poland’s artists.3 Nonetheless, in terms of his biography and his artistic legacy, this is a figure who has been researched in a very fragmented manner, perhaps because thus far not a single piece of his work is known to exist. Data is usually given in publications that in around 1780 Ottosielski worked for the Radziwiłł princes in Nesvyzh, where he painted decorations for the court theatre there, before moving to the Sapieha family’s Derechin estate, and lived in Vilnius from 1793 where he created a number of theatrical set designs and interior mural paintings.4 This article focuses on research of this artist’s biography, using sources to correct the life dates of the artist and his family members, the geography of his activities, paying particular attention to his time spent in Vilnius.

The article analyses the Church of St Peter and St Paul, built at the end of the eighteenth century in Maliatsichy (present-day Belarus) at the initiative of the Archbishop of Mogilev, Stanislaw Bohusz-Siestrzencewicz (1731-1826). The study is based on a comparison of a well-known image of this church (more precisely, the Roman Basilica of St Peter, identified as the Church of St Stanislaus in Maliatsichy), published in Leonard Chodzka’s Parisian publication La Pologne, historique, littéraire, monumentale et illustrée, with the data from written sources. The article questions some of the assumptions made in the literature about this interesting architectural monument, which has not survived to the present day, and for the first time discusses the interior of the sanctuary in more detail and analyses its architectural and symbolic links with the original model - St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The conclusion is, that the Maliatsichy Church was conceived as a visual expression of Siestrzencewicz’s loyalty to the Roman Pope and as a symbol of the Belarusian Archbishop’s connection to the Catholic Church as a whole when forced to submit to the secular rule of the Russian Empire. It is possible that this church was also meant to express the unity of Roman and Greek Catholics under the Pope.

The article addresses the theme of peasants in the work of Pranciškus Smuglevičius (Franciszek Smuglewicz, 1745–1807) and discusses the most significant works on this theme extant in the collections of Lithuania and Poland. Special attention is devoted to the compositions depicting two Cracowians in a tavern. It is noted that a group of paintings of a similar composition exists and most of them are attributed to P. Smuglevičius. In this article, an attempt is made to figure out which works were painted by P. Smuglevičius himself, which paintings should be attributed to copies, and how the abundance of versions of this small modest composition can be explained. A discussion of the examples of the image of Cracowian peasants in other fields of eighteenth-century culture revealed that, unlike P. Smuglevičius’s numerous earlier works on the peasant theme, Cracowians in a Tavern is not just a manifestation of his interest in the life and daily round of the third estate. This composition can be read as an allegoric painting that hides a generalised picture of the peasantry as an inseparable part of the nation under a “mask” of an everyday scene and a study of folk types.

The article discusses a watercolour painting from a private collection authored by Wojciech Iwaszkiewicz, artillery ober-bombardier of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the background of the urban landscape are objects that allow easy identification of the capital of Lithuania: partly ruined Upper Castle and the Bekesh Hill. Other objects and figures are identifiable by the inscriptions on the other side of the painting. Particularly interesting is the first plan of the drawing, which depicts the Tatar Gates and a few wooden houses standing near them. This is the only known view of the Tatar Gates of the Vilnius defensive wall. The buildings also depict a number of city dwellers, most of them being military personnel of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (artillery officer, cannoneer, ober-feurwerker, etc., as well as the author of the painting himself ), thus the picture is also interesting as a source of research into different military uniforms. Inscriptions by the Upper Castle and Bekesh Hill reflect legends and stories, popular among Vilnians at the end of the eighteenth century. In the former case, one tower of the castle is named as the temple of the pagan god Lelum Polelum Swistum po Swistum. Yet above the Bekesh Hill is written a legend about the reckless death of this cadet on the way down while riding a horse. Through historical sources we were able to determine that W. Iwaszkiewicz enlisted into the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a cannoneer in the spring of 1790, soon was raised to the rank of the bombardier and in the spring of 1791 to the ober-bombardier, yet in the summer of 1793 he was raised to the rank of stykjunker. The painting in analysis is related to a particular event: attempts to reform and strengthen the Lithuanian artillery at the end of the eighteenth century and the amassing of the military in Vilnius. In spite of somewhat primitive style of the painting, it’s a very interesting and valuable document of urban iconography.