El bautismo de Lituania

Matejko painted this in 1888, at a time when Poland did not exist on any map, carved up between Russia, Prussia and Austria. His answer to that erasure was to paint his nation's past so vividly that no partition could delete it. Here he reaches back to 1387 and the baptism of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into Christianity, a conversion tied to the marriage of its grand duke Jogaila, soon king of Poland, to the young Polish queen Jadwiga, a union that bound the two states together for generations. Crowds press in before the temple of the old thunder god as the pagan order gives way. The scene is one of a dozen in his cycle on the civilizing moments of Polish history, made in the last years of his life.