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

Krzysztof Pomian, Antoni Ziemba, Grażyna Bastek The Exhibition “The Elevated:...
investitures, birth announcements, weddings, audiences and homages, triumphant entries and
parades) and leisure (hunts, games in the park, sports, tournaments, banquets, feasts, balls).
The culture of the table and of feasting (such as Heinrich, Count von Brühls Swan Service)
was a space where the ostentation of power could be celebrated.
The exhibition’s next historical section, “A façade of equality. Republican hierarchies,”
announced regimes that proclaimed equality to negate the hierarchy of birth. It used exam-
ples to signal the aristocratic ethos in Greek democracies and oligarchies (the Greek athlete’s
figure, which suggests a similarity between the elevated human and the god Apollo and marks
being part of the elite thanks to a native and a practised strength and corporal beauty, which in
turn generate moral beauty, nobility and virility); civic ethos in republican and imperial Rome
(sculpted bust of a citizen) and the mediaeval and modern republican regimes: Venice as a re-
public of the urban aristocracy directed by the doge, the Republic of the United Provinces of
the Netherlands as a republic of urban patricians led by the stadhouder and the noble-magnate
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth governed by the elected monarch. In the latter regime,
power was exercised through free elections and legislation created by laws (constitutions)
by the parliament (Sejm), which convened with the king as chairman, expressing the tension
between hierarchy and the utopia of equality. The portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Polish magnates made it clear that for them dress carried political ideology. The ruler
or the aristocrat could appear in dress wrongly called national costume, which in fact was civic
dress perceived as native, belonging to the Commonwealth’s “people,” the nobility. It signi-
fied being a citizen of the republic, a communal state of declared equality and parliamentary
democracy. Foreign dress, however, when worn by a magnate raised him above the mass of
citizens and indicated that he belonged to a supranational court elite. The knight’s dress (ar-
mour) could be ambiguous: by referring to the virtue of courage, it either suggested belonging
to the knightly order from the feudal hierarchy or referred to the traditions of the milites of
antiquity, especially the citizens of Rome with their egalitarian ethos. A series of lithographs
by Stanislaw Lentz with portraits of the deputies to the First Constitutional Assembly in 1919
illustrate the principle of equality before the law and the introduction of laws of equality in
Europe in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. It was juxtaposed to a series of paintings of
deputies to the Four-Year Sejm of 1784-1791 by Józef Peszka. The Sejm elections in 1918 (for
1919) were the first fully equal democratic act, since men, women and ethnic and religious
minorities took part. The March Constitution of 1921 established this system.
Authoritarian systems, which the exhibition called periods of regression, recurred regu-
larly after democratic and more or less egalitarian regimes. The motif of “Józef Pilsudski - from
citizen to dictator” showed authoritarian Europe through the two versions in the marshal’s
iconography: the cult of civic virtues presented in the images of a modest legionary and citizen
in an army coat devoid of distinctions juxtaposed to the personality cult shown in the glorifying
images of the Chief, leader and ruler of nation and state. Totalitarian Europe was represented
by the contrast of propaganda photographs and films (including some by Leni Riefenstahl)
and a Nazi uniform with a concentration camp inmate’s striped uniform and paintings by
Jonasz Stern, Xawery Dunikowski and Andrzej Wróblewski, which showed the absolutism of
the new slave society’s reign over life and death. Stalinism and “real” communism proclaimed
equality, but it was only pretend equality with the cult of the Leader, new collective heroes
hierarchically elevated, the party functionaries, juxtaposed to the “people,” employees and
proletarians, whom the propaganda portrayed as a community of equal and satisfied citizens.
“Today’s hierarchies,” the section devoted to contemporary society, was the third and
last part of the exhibition. Our democratic society, despite its foundation of the principles of

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