Coronation of the First King, 1001 AD, from the series “History of Civilization in Poland”

The title dates the coronation to 1001. Historians date it to 1025, a few months before Bolesław the Brave died. Matejko was not inventing the year. He was following Jan Długosz, the 15th-century chronicler who wrote that Emperor Otto III, struck by the Polish duke's wealth, crowned him on the spot and put his own diadem on his head. The meeting Długosz described took place at Gniezno in the year 1000, and Matejko staged it as a full coronation, inside a church whose architecture belongs to a period several centuries later. He painted it in 1889 as one of 12 scenes of the History of Civilization in Poland, small oil panels, each with a commentary he wrote himself. There was no Polish state on the map that year, and he was working in Kraków, under Austrian rule.