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    Published: 2023-05-16
    No. 6 (2022)

    Barefoot or in disguise - about the possibilities of expressing objection in old art.

    Przemysław Mrozowski
    Artifex Novus
    Section: Artykuły tematyczne
    https://doi.org/10.21697/an.12124

    Abstract

    The opposition to customary norms or im- posed political solutions could be expressed in many ways in the old art. Małgorzata Wielogłowska, on her tombstone from around 1564 in Czechów, presents herself in festive clothes, which ladies of high birth wore, for example, to the church. But her bare feet stick out from under her skirt, she is barefoot. In the spirit of humility, she provocatively rejected one of the applicable signs of the social status. The slightly later portrait of Piotr Krajewski from 1583 can be considered a testimony of the reverse attitude. In this case, the expression of contestation is not the rejection of clothing or its important fragment, but the appearance in a „costume” – the outfit modeled on strongly orientalizing Hungarian costumes of the time. Such clothes began to appear in Poland in the mid-sixteenth century, but then they were considered an expression of extravagance. In the era of the first elective kings, they became popular among the nobility as a kind of „uniform” – a testimony to the aversion to the moral influences of the West. Less than 30 years later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, such clothing would become the „standard” – the national dress, the only one that was considered appropriate for the Polish nobility, an expression of an attitude characteristic of the emerging Sarmatism.

    Keywords:

    breaking customs, bare feet, 16th-century tombstones, portrait, orientalization of cloth- ing, Sarmatism, contestation of the West

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    Citation rules

    Mrozowski, P. (2023). Barefoot or in disguise - about the possibilities of expressing objection in old art. Artifex Novus, (6), 44–67. https://doi.org/10.21697/an.12124

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