Prussian Homage

When Jan Matejko finished this enormous canvas in 1882, Poland did not exist on the map. It had been carved up decades earlier between Russia, Austria and Prussia. So Matejko painted a day when things had run the other way. On 10 April 1525, in the market square of Krakow, Albrecht of Hohenzollern, the Duke of Prussia, knelt before the Polish king Sigismund the Old and swore loyalty to him. In the painting the Polish court fills the steps in full Renaissance splendour, and the kneeling duke in red is the ancestor of the very Prussia that would later help erase Poland. Matejko packed in more than thirty figures, some of whom were not actually there in 1525, because the point was to gather the nation's memory, not to keep to the record. He gave the finished picture to the Polish people, and it hangs today in Krakow, a few steps from the square where that homage took place.