Rocznik Historii Sztuki (39.2014)

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AGNIESZKA WHELAN

Charles Rollin. In effect, Powązki revolved around a didactic programme, commented on principles of morał living, on the family’s role as
enlightened citizens and on the current State of Poland. The ‘Powązki poets’ under the Czartoryski patronage - Adam Naruszewicz, Franciszek
Karpiński and Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin placed the garden within the classical pastorał as a pleasant and virtuous place. They styled its
adult inhabitants as enlightened shepherds protecting their flock of the nation. The childrcn figured as the inheritors of their parents’ ideals.
The poet Adam Naruszewicz presented the two year old Adam Jerzy as a wise Amor making wreaths to honour his małe linę, already at this
young age leaming appropriate attitudes in the language of symbols. Naruszewicz consciously based himself on the poetic imagery of Salomon
Gessner, the most influential poet of the new pastorał. Gessner’s works not only took over the imagination of Polish poets, they were regarded
as particularly useful for teaching children morał examples. Educators saw in them a suitable model for an exemplary relationship between
children and their parents, a format for the expression of innocent feelings and as an endorsement of an ideał of living in naturę as a source
of happiness. Czartoryska favoured Gessner’s works above all others and most likely included them in the children’s performances of pastorał
poetry. Adam Jerzy particularly enjoyed these private theatrical entertainments. They formed a part not only of his own upbringing but also
that of his mother’s. During Izabela’s childhood in Wołczyn, her govemess Madame Petit followed the influential educational theories of
Charles Rollin, author of Traite des etudes, Histoire Ancienne and Histoire Romaine. Rollin was an advocator of a respectful and tender atti-
tude to children and an enthusiastic believer in the vałue of visualizations from ancient history. Madame Petit took over the charge of the next
generation and used the same books and methods in their education, as she did with Czartoryska. Both Izabela and her husband Adam Kazi-
mierz attached a singular importance to the educational ąualities of theatre and saw the art of public self presentation as a culturally construc-
tive form of communication. During the decade before the establishment of Powązki the Czartoryskis participated in the founding of the
National Theatre and supported its short-lived activity. Izabela was an accomplished actress in her own right, Adam Kazimierz coached the
actors in the art of expressive gesture, wrote plays for the public theatre and for the students of the School of Cadets. He encouraged his
students to read and to visualize pastorał poetry and to assimilate its ideals of virtue. A drawing Izabela commissioned from her artist Jean
Pierre Norblin demonstrates the primacy of gesture as a means of emotional exchanges in Powązki. Following the accidental death of the eldest
daughter Teresa, the Princess chose to memorialize herself and the children in a mouming ritual. Only restrained gestures signify the intema-
lizcd emotions. Instead, the expressive strength of the presentation shifts onto the viewer, who needs to draw on his own experiences in order
to identify himself with the subject and emotionally participate in the scene. This type of presentation falls into the theories of distanced, self-
conscious, and intemalized expression promoted by Diderot and popularized by Rousseau, and shows the interactions in Powązki as highly
stylized and emotionally charged exchanges. The children leamed to imitate the Gessnerian pastorał ideał not only in theatrical visualizations;
they were able to experience it directly. They lived in a little hameau in the pleasure grounds, each in a little modest cabin with a garden,
while their mother inhabited a larger thatched log house. Czartoryska tumed over half of the one hundred hectare estate into an arabie farm
and followed an example of her father Jan Jerzy Flemming and her grandfather Michał Czartoryski in an exemplary land management. The
productive part of the ferme omee entered the pleasure grounds. Sheep and cattle grazed near the cabins, while fishing in the omamental lakę
combined the useful with the beautiful and presented a subject for paintings by Jean Pierre Norblin. The Czartoryski children visited the farms;
they also leamed to grow plants in their own gardens as part of their daily routine. While many contemporary writers praised the benefits of
work in the garden for young children, Czartoryska added to gardening an emotional dimension. She taught her children to express their feelings
through planting and to connect them with the attachment to people and to land. Emotional planting in Powązki became a form of communi-
cation which the family continued throughout their lives. Charles Rollin’s Histoires added a historically moralizing element to the Gessnerian
ideał. Rollin associated the events of the past with personal ąualities of people. His virtuous kings, generals and heroes in the times of peace
invariably exchanged their swords for ploughs and vine knives and continued as shepherds of their people. For Adam Jerzy and his younger
brother Konstanty these were the role models which they could enact, absorb and build on in a manner appropriate for their age. The design
of Powązki extended the sphere of rural, pastorał associations by the introduction of the vemacular architectural elements and classical sculp-
tural references: Polish rustic cabins, Roman ruins, medieval buildings and classical statues of Pastorał Poetry, Virtue and Diana the Hunter.
Deer roamed the place; their presence connected the new landscape garden with the Polish traditional estate. Czartoryska leased additional
statues at the times of fetes and engaged in performances involving laying the wreaths and garlands of flowers on altars of gratitude, in
a manner reminiscent of compositions by Boucher, Greuze or Gessner. Paintings by Jean Pierre Norblin record a close identification of the
inhabitants of Powązki with the imagined past: the figures touch the statuę of Virtue and wander in the proximity of a classical tomb. The
children drew naturally on the connection between the Polish vemacular, antiąuity and the pastorał: the girls performed Polish dances dressed
in Greek clothes; Adam Jerzy danced a cossack and played on arcadian bagpipes. The musical activities continued the associations with the
ancients. Rollin argued, using historical examples, that teaching of musie refined peoples’ characters and gathered individuals into a charitable,
gentle and pious society. The background for the activities taking place in Powązki was a set of ruins in front of Czartoryska’s hut - identified
here as the copies of the Arch of Septimus Severus, the column of Focas and the Tempie of Vespasian and Titus. They were presented in
a half buried State, just as they appeared at the time on Campo Vaccino in Romę. A short distance from the garden ruins stood a copy of the
Theatre of Marcellus, a building which like the Roman original no longer fiinctioned as a theatre, but contained stables and habitable rooms.
Significantly there was no theatre building in Powązki, instead performances took place in open air. Rollin and eighteenth century historians
endowed the performances sub Jove with ąualities of simplicity and social eąuality characteristic of the Republican period. In contrast, the
ruined remnants of the Imperial Romę commented on the temporal naturę of the authoritarian rule, and together with performances on the
grass pressed the message of the Czartoryski republican orientation. In this inteipretation the visual programme of Powązki sets itself in oppo-
sition to the design devised by the king Stanisław August Poniatowski for the interiors of the royal castle which referenced the mle of Octavian.
As Powązki functioned not only as a private retreat but a space open to the scrutiny of Warsaw and nobility from the whole Commonwealth,
especially at the time of large scalę theatrical productions, fetes, fairs and fireworks displays, these meanings received a public dimension. The
‘entirely Polish and republican’ education the children, shows itself therefore as a matter of private and public concem. This article puts to rest
the pervasive notion that the culture of leisure carried no other meanings than self-serving indulgence and entertainment. Instead, the garden
shows itself as the public space intended partly as the exposition of the educational methods of bringing up children and the space visualising
the family’s political orientation within, what’s important, leisurely activities.