szkice ozdób oraz broni do obrazu ‘Pogrzeb wodza Rusów’ 1881 - 1883

Henryk Siemiradzki made this sketch of ornaments and weapons for his painting 'The Funeral of a Ruthenian Chief'. Siemiradzki was a Polish painter who spent his career in Rome. He was known for academic paintings, often on subjects from antiquity. Here, however, we see him engaging with the history of the Eastern Slavs – the Rus’ – who formed a loose federation in modern day Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, from roughly the 9th to the 12th centuries. Siemiradzki’s painting presents the funeral as a pagan ritual, with the skeleton of a horse accompanying the chieftain into the afterlife. This sketch, now held by the National Museum in Krakow, allows insight into the research that Siemiradzki undertook for the painting. The jewelry, weapons and ornaments depicted here were likely inspired by archeological finds and anthropological studies, as well as the artist’s own imagination. Art history shows us how much the image of the past is itself a product of the present.