There is an amazing painting of Virgin with Child from Holy Cross Church in Żywiec (nowadays in City Museum there, as a deposit from parish Church of Our Lady in Żywiec), which has recently been displayed on a temporary exhibition in the National Museum in Cracow. It is one of…
In 2016 the Bowes Museum (Barnard Castle, County Durham, UK) acquired an early-Netherlandish painting of St. Luke drawing the Virgin and Child. It is attributed to the workshop of Dirk Bouts, one of the most important Netherlandish painters of the 15th century. It was probably not completed by the Master…
The Old Masters often had their individual types of female beauties: perhaps muses or mistresses, who were the models for their Madonnas, Venuses or Dianas. Usually when we see particular type of female face repeated in many paintings of one artist, we tend to assume that it may be a…
Today I would like to focus on one of the most famous masterpieces of Polish collections: The Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1490). The painting, by Leonardo da Vinci, is usually interpreted as a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, who was a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. This interpretation…
And so it’s September again, that is the time of the grape harvest. I will again write about wine in art, but this time it will not be related to the Biblical stories (previously I wrote about Noah and Lot). Today I am going to focus on the ancient mythology…