Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie (1(37).2012/2013)

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The Museum

education programme, which included a multi-segment public debate about the mechanisms
of democracy and social hierarchies.2
The exhibition was divided into three conceptual parts. The first one addressed the ir-
repressible privileges of the elevated, of social elites. The uppermost of these privileges is the
right to immortality, which symbolically eternalizes the prominent person through the funeral
rite, sepulchral art (tombs and tombstones, steles of antiquity, Greece, Etruscans and Romans;
castra doloris and catafalques, Old Polish coffin portraits). The second entitlement is the right
to a face, the privilege of having a named image as a portrait serving social elevation and con-
structing hierarchy. The first room of the exhibition was crowded with busts and portrait heads
ranging from antiquity to the twentieth century. The right to a face was only democratized by
portrait photography at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (beginning with
the daguerreotype and progressing to family photograph albums and photo booths).
Numismatic specimen, which in themselves stemmed from the privilege of the elevated to
mint and issue coins and medals, told their own narrative, which accompanied the sequence of
issues. They represented themes such as the funeral, the burial, the tombstone, the allegories
of power, the architecture of power, the statues of power, heraldry, the assembly of Polish rul-
ers, the insignia of power, coronations, births, nuptials, supremacy, victory, conquest, homage
and military triumph, parades, entries and portraits of rulers and of distinguished persons.
The second part of the exhibition provided a synthetic historical overview. First, it showed
the old hierarchical societies, beginning with the systems of antiquity where the ruler appeared
as a deity and his subjects were elevated through proximity to him (Mesopotamian stamps,
Assyrian and Egyptian sculpture) and those societies in which the ruler governed by divine
appointment, surrounded by sacrum (the idea of the Roman Empire with the apotheosis of
Caesar, which would be adopted in the conceptions of the Byzantine Basileus, Nubian princes
and modern monarchs). The old hierarchical societies believed in three basic criteria for eleva-
tion: elevation by birth seen in the system of heraldry, genealogy and orders; elevation with
money and elevation through the power of education, knowledge and intellectual and creative
achievement. Demonstrations of the elevated ones’ piety (the funding of works of religious
art) played an important part in building the elites’ prestige. The elite created a comprehensive
system of attributes of power. They included paintings (glorifying images, the portrait of the
current ruler, the statue as portrait, the equestrian portrait), sounds (coronation or funereal
music, table music) and words (monarchs’ titles). But, above all, by dress and props. For ex-
ample, coronation dress was subjected to various political strategies, as was the case of the
elected Polish kings: when the monarch appeared in nobility-national dress (which in fact
was republican-civic), he was presenting himself as a citizen of the republic, of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth, who had been elected as “first among equals”; when he appeared
in universal European royal, coronation dress or in Roman costume made to look antique,
he was claiming hereditary, absolute power that defied choice. Specific places and rituals also
constructed social hierarchy: residences (palaces and gardens), the symbolic architecture of
power (the triumphal arch, column, obelisk) and ceremonies (coronations, enthronements,
i Wanda Załęska, “Kultura stołu jako sposób wywyższenia” [The culture of the table as a method of social elevation];
Bartek Chaciński, “WWWywyższenie” [EleWWWation]; Ewa Wojtowicz, “Celebrytyzm w sieci. Droga do sławy
w Internecie 2.0.” [Celebritism on the Internet. The road to fame on the Internet 2.0.]. It also includes an illustrated
map of the exhibition created by Grażyna Bastek and Antoni Ziemba and a list of exhibits by Aleksandra Janiszewska.
2 Przemysław Głowacki and team (Education Department of the National Museum in Warsaw) developed
this programme.