레이탄

Matejko finished this enormous canvas in 1866, and it shows a single desperate act from nearly a century before. In 1773 the parliament of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was being pressured to approve the first carving-up of the country by its neighbours. A deputy named Tadeusz Rejtan, seeing the vote about to pass, threw himself down in the doorway, tore open his shirt and begged the others not to step over him and leave. That is the figure sprawled at the lower right. Matejko was painting under foreign rule himself, when Poland had vanished from the map, so the scene was also a message to his own time. Later the Austrian emperor bought the picture, and it hung in Vienna until Poland regained its independence and brought it home to the royal castle in Warsaw.