Tapiserie Zygmunta Augusta – okazy kolekcjonerskiej magnificencji, nowatorstwa artystycznego, nowoczesnego ilustratorstwa epistemicznego .......... 639

SIGISMUND AUGUSTUS’ TAPESTRIES – EXAMPLES OF COLLECTOR’S MAGNIFICENCE, ARTISTIC INNOVATION, AND EARLY MODERN EPISTEMIC ILLUSTRATION

The article discusses the collection of tapestries belonging to Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, as a product of Early Modern collecting. The author presents it as an ostentation of monarchical magnificentia, magnanimitas, liberalitas, the virtues of a good ruler, whose development he traces from Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), through Cicero (De inventione) to Giovanni Pontano (De Magnificentia, 1498), pointing out that their writings were present in the royal library. He points to the pioneering role of Sigismund’s ‘verdure’ tapestries in the creation of the Netherlandish models of the closed landscape (an intimate view of forest interior), of single or double focal point landscape, and of the realistic native landscape. He points to the primacy of Sigismundian Tapestries with Old Testament scenes in creating a new Renaissance and Reformation model of literal reading of biblical stories. The role of animal tapestries in the very beginnings of Renaissance empirical botanical and zoological science is fundamental: they constitute the first monumental set of epistemic images, a ‘woven zoological and botanical atlas,’ very contemporary with the compendia of Fuchs and Gessner, Dodonaeus and Clusius, Belon and Wotton. The author extensively analyses the accumulation of flora and fauna specimens from the New World in the Sigismundian Tapestries, and interprets them as an expression of interest in overseas discoveries, present in the Krakow royal court and humanist circles, as a means of encyclopaedic connoisseurship of the Early Modern collecting, and as a tool for glorifying the monarch ruling (intellectually) over the entire universe.