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The National Museum in Warsaw, which has more than 800,000 artworks in its collection, is just one of Poland’s many important museums. It’s also one of the places where these five paintings can be found.
Earlier versions of the descriptions of these paintings first appeared in 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die
, edited by Stephen Farthing (2018). Writers’ names appear in parentheses.
Meeting with the Village Mayor (1873)
While the Barbizon school of painters in France were propounding their theories on realism in art from around 1830 to 1870, there was a similar trend for realism in Poland. One of the leading figures in Polish Realist art was Józef Chełmoński, whose paintings are unerringly convincing. Although the artist traveled to Paris in 1875, where his work was received with enthusiasm, he never lost the distinctly Polish quality to his paintings. He trained in Warsaw under Wojciech Gerson, who taught many of the masters of 19th-century Polish art an
SCALA/Art Resource, New York
Caravaggio transformed the religious art of his time, using bold compositions and an uncompromising sense of realism to give his pictures a genuine feeling of immediacy.
The Conversion on the Way to Damascus is one of his best-known paintings, produced when he was at the height of his powers. The biblical story of Saul’s conversion was a popular subject for artists. A Roman citizen (he is dressed as a Roman soldier in this picture), he was actively persecuting Christians when, on the road to Damascus, he was thrown from his horse and blinded by a heavenly light. Following his conversion he changed his name to Paul. Characteristically, the artist played down the supernatural element, reducing the blinding, celestial rays to a modest glimmer in the upper right-hand corner of the picture. The process of the saint’s conversion is internalized the unkempt groom is unaware of the drama, and seems more concerned with calming the frightened horse. Caravagg
Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
The oeuvre of Titian was subject to a number of shifts in import and sensibility over the course of his career. Whereas the bacchanals, painted for the duke of Alfonso d’Este’s studio in Ferrara, were for the most part joyous and inflected with a certain youthful fervor, during the 1550s Titian worked under the patronage of King Philip II. From 1553 he produced seven mythological paintings, all of which were rather more complex in their treatment of the fallibility of the human condition. Titian defined these paintings as poesie or “painted poems.” These took as their subjects themes from ancient mythology. In