Les Torches de Néron

When the National Museum in Kraków began its collection, this was the first thing in it. Henryk Siemiradzki, a Polish painter working in Rome, gave the canvas to the young museum in 1879, and it was entered as item number one, the seed the whole collection grew from. The scene it shows is grim. Nero and his court gather on a marble terrace to watch Christians, bound to stakes and about to be set alight as living torches to light his gardens, a punishment the Roman writer Tacitus recorded. Poles under Russian rule read it as a picture about their own persecution, and an inscription from John’s Gospel on the frame, about light shining in darkness, pointed them that way. Siemiradzki painted the crowd of onlookers larger and more finished than the victims themselves.