Temporary exhibition ‘Teutonic Knight pretty as a picture’

Exhibition venue: Middle Castle – Chancellery of the Grand Masters, Council Chamber

Opening date: 5 July 2024 – 1 October 2024 (or until the end of the year)

Introduction to the subject of the exhibition

In 2023 the Malbork Castle Museum completed a multi-year exhibition series  revolving around the history of the castle and the people who created, used and transformed the place. These processes were spread over several centuries from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. This was also the chronological framework of a series of four cross-sectional exhibitions, with only the last of these exhibitions including artefacts from all these eras.

A lasting trace of these exhibitions are their catalogues and volumes with essays detailing the themes depicted through the monuments.

This has brought a refreshed and sometimes new perspective on some of the phenomena described by historians. A surprising result of the queries and observations of the antiquarian market was the disclosure of, admittedly singular, but previously unknown to researchers, monuments from the modern period. One of these is a processional banner commemorating the Order’s Grand Master Herman von Salza as the founder of Chełmno.

The conservation of this singular physical testimony to the local memory of the Order and the history of the region, carried out on the initiative and under the supervision of the Malbork Castle Museum, and its first public display as part of the last of the aforementioned exhibitions, gave rise to a longer presence of this monument formally owned by the parish of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Chełmno in our museum. It was decided to organise a limited exhibition of a small group of artefacts from the Malbork Castle Museum’s collection, which, together with the temporarily entrusted banner, are linked by an iconographic motif, namely the figure of the Teutonic Knights to commemorate the results of the research and collecting efforts of the last quarter of a century.

The temporary exhibition ‘Teutonic Knight pretty as a picture’ is located in the Grand Master’s Council Chamber – the lower floor of the Grand Masters’ Palace, a building in which two representative rooms of the main floor, i.e. the Winter and Summer Refectories, are decorated with wall paintings with full-figure images of the Order’s grand masters.

These two groups of paintings come from historically distant eras. The surviving relic paintings in the Winter Refectory were created in the 15th century, so at a time when the Palace we are in was inhabited and used by the people depicted in them.

The Grand Masters in the Summer Refectory were painted in the mid-19th century, when they were only a distant memory, both in Malbork Castle and the entire region of former Monastic Prussia.

Through the set of monuments presented here, we show how the image of the Teutonic Knights became a vehicle of memory and historical reflection in the modern era.

The exhibition is divided into two parts called Presentation and Narrative – a reference to the two sets of paintings mentioned above.

The first part is made up of two sections. The first section presents images of the great masters in Prussia, which were a manifestation of the awareness and historical reflection of the inhabitants of the region lying within the borders of the Polish Kingdom and belonging to the Teutonic state in the Middle Ages.

The section closes with a portrait of the Grand Master from the Viennese line of the Order, which preserved its religious tradition and organisational structure that had disappeared in Prussia.

An additional element of this theme are porcelain items – elements of tableware from the Order’s Vienna residence.

 The second section depicts the appearance of the grand masters and knights of the order functioning outside of Prussia in the modern era, as well as depictions of the appearance of the Teutonic Knights in the late Middle Ages.

Section II consists of paintings depicting historical and fictional scenes in historical settings in which the Teutonic Knights participate.

A wider commentary on Part I

The medieval images of the Grand Masters in the Winter Refectory acted as a presentation of the Order’s highest dignitaries as the leaders of a religious organisation and, at the same time, feudal lords over the vast area of the state they had created. This was a visual manifestation of the Order’s position in the political feudal structure of Europe, in which the Teutonic State remained a separate entity. This visual message, aimed primarily at the Order’s guests and allies, strongly suggested that the power of the grand masters, although derived by election to office and therefore contrary to the rule of heredity, was equivalent to that exercised by secular feudal lords: kings and princes.

After the middle of the 15th century, as a result of protracted conflicts and wars with its neighbours – the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania – the Order lost a large part of its territory, which with the approval and support of its inhabitants was incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland as a district called Royal Prussia.

Portraits of grand masters of the order painted in these lost territories between the 17th and 18th centuries were created and commissioned as an expression of historical awareness of the inhabitants of the region, which at the time had been part of the Kingdom of Poland for more than two hundred years. The intellectual elite of the region (bourgeoisie, clergy, academics) were fully aware of the benefits of the liberation of their predecessors from the rule of the Order. Nevertheless, they still had respect for the order’s legacy – both cultural and spiritual.

In 1525, the Teutonic State in Prussia ceased to exist.

The profound political and religious-social changes that led to its liquidation did not, however, cause the Order of the Hospital of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the German House to cease to function altogether. Although its members, led by Grand Master Albert of Prussia, abandoned the monastic lifestyle and became lay, Protestant noblemen, those brothers residing in monasteries scattered beyond the borders of Prussia remained faithful to their centuries-long traditions.

A wider commentary on Part II

Scenes of more or less dynamic action involving knights of the German Order were included in illustrated chronicles both in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period. But for narrative paintings, i.e. those telling a story involving the Teutonic Knights, to become a stand-alone subject for painters, the people’s perception and understanding of the past had to evolve.

The breakthrough occurred at a time when European culture had fully developed the ideas of Romanticism and, in the political sphere, the values of freedom brought about by the Napoleonic wars came to the fore.

In the 1820s, a series of several compositions depicting scenes from the history of the Order was created. They took the form of stained glass windows for the Summer Refectory in Malbork (destroyed as a result of the Second World War) and also as oil paintings. The history of the order also became the basis for literary works, including Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod, which in turn inspired writers to pen their own stories depicting life in the order.

After the middle of the nineteenth century, with the development of modern critical thought in evaluating the past, accompanied by post-Romantic trends persisting in artists’ interest, themes related to the medieval knights of the German Order appeared sporadically in the work of Central European painters, but were given great freedom of interpretation. Unlike the depictions from the 1920s, which were influenced by the requirements of those who commissioned them or the authors of the literary works they were meant to illustrate, independent painters who chose the Teutonic Order as their subject matter were now free to choose what to paint and how.

This aspect of artistic invention and creation, in the context of drawing inspiration from historical events, is illustrated in the exhibition by the oeuvre of Jan Matejko. It is evoked by two sketches that are preparatory works for the depiction of the theme of the Grunwald victory of 15 July 1410.

Even in his early works, Matejko reached for themes related to the climax of the great Lithuanian war against the German Order, i.e. the Battle of Grunwald. In 1855, he made a painting entitled Władysław Jagiełło with Witold praying before the Battle of Grunwald.

Over the years the Kraków master developed elements of this theme, attempting to illustrate the full extent of that momentous event. In 1861 he created a painting, in the form of a preliminary composition sketch, entitled Władysław II at the battlefield of Grunwald. It depicts the body of Grand Master Ulrich Jungingen, with Władysław Jagiełło and a group of defeated and surviving monastic knights standing by his side.

The sketches presented at the exhibition: showing a monastic dignitary defeated in battle in 1864, and the battle itself in 1872, are testimony to Matejko’s work on the theme of the Grunwald triumph. The painterly sketch for the Battle of Grunwald, which he completed by 1878, shows that the final work repeats the arrangement from the project (sketch) presented here without major compositional changes.

You can read more about both sketches, the context and circumstances of their creation here:

https://skarby.zamek.malbork.pl/szkic-postaci-dostojnika-zakonnego-jana-matejki/

https://skarby.zamek.malbork.pl/matejko-w-prusach/

The paintings, prints and other items presented at the exhibition are at the same time an illustration of the research and collecting activities of the Malbork Castle Museum over the last 25 years.

Two of the artefacts on display were borrowed from external partners of the Museum, which subjected them to conservation (the work was carried out by the art conservator Agnieszka Ruszkowska), thus making their public presentation possible, something that had never been possible before.

The remaining artefacts are the property of the Castle Museum; all of them, with the exception of Jan Matejko’s sketch to the Battle of Grunwald, which was donated from the National Museum in Warsaw in 1983, were purchased from auction houses and antiquarian bookshops.