One of the ideas guiding us in the creation of the portal Małopolska’s Virtual Museums is to draw attention to the details of the exhibits, often overlooked intricate decorations, which sometimes surprise when looking closer at the texture and shapes of the presented objects. We strive to use advanced technology to bring out these details and draw people closer to them. With the help of such “magnification”, we would like you to stop you for a moment, or maybe even sometimes make you feel delighted?
What do the ornaments want? What are they to a work of art? Could an ornament be a signature? These, and many other interesting questions, came up during the LXIII National Science Session of the Association of Art Historians entitled Ornament and decoration of a work of art (November 20-22, 2014, Kraków), in which we had the pleasure of participating, presenting exhibits selected for the conference subject matter from the collection of Małopolska’s Virtual Museums.

An ancient historian from the 1^st century — Pliny the Elder — in his 37-volume encyclopedia titled Natural history, compiled knowledge gathered from works of about 200 authors, thanks to which he preserved the echoes of lost writings and information about the Greek world for posterity, which included many stories concerning art. It was he who repeated the now famous anecdote about the dispute between Apelles — the greatest painter of his time — and another representative of this craft: Protogenes. Apelles — once he had heard of the fame of his competitor — went to Rhodes to see his works. However, he did not find the painter at home, while a board ready to be painted was set on the easel, watched by an old woman. When she asked Apelles who was visiting, the painter grabbed the brush and drew an extremely thin line through the centre of the painting, then he replied: “That’s who.”

Could Tadeusz Kościuszko, the famous leader of the Uprising in 1794, have been a painter?
In the National Museum in Kraków, there are nudes made with a red-brown chalk (so-called sanguine) and watercolour panoramas of Rome painted by Kościuszko.

One of the legends of the town of Olkusz, passed down by generations, tells the story of the silver mines, to which the town owed its prosperity. One day, the devil decided to fill up the excavations that were so valuable for the inhabitants of the region.

Mirosław Hermaszewski — a brigadier general of the Polish Army and a cosmonaut, was the first and the only Pole to fly into space. In 1976, together with Colonel Zenon Jankowski, he was chosen from several hundred Polish pilots as the candidate for a space flight organised within the international Intercosmos space programme. 

Among the medicinal plants preserved on the stained glass, which can be seen in the Museum of Pharmacy of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, there is an aconite specimen with a blue inflorescence, which, according to Greek mythology, grew out of the saliva of Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades. What does another exhibit in the collection of WMM  – Herbarium by Szymon Syreniusz – say about it?

On one of the seven hills of Rome – the Esquiline Hill – caves full of ancient paintings were excavated around 1480 under the foundations of medieval buildings. Their walls were decorated with fantastic, light and symmetrical structures created of figural, animal and floral motifs. La grotte, or caves, were in fact ruins of the villa of the Emperor Nero. It was called Domus Aurea because of the extraordinarily rich decoration of the walls and the inner part of the dome, which were covered with gold and paintings. They were created between AD 54 and 68 and related to the turn of the Third Style and Fourth Style of Pompeian painting.

Prezentowana drewniana puszka w kulistym kształcie służyła w aptece do pozłacania i posrebrzania pigułek. W ten sposób łagodzono ich przykry smak, a także zabezpieczano przed wysychaniem i psuciem. Sposób powlekania pigułek złotem można znaleźć na przykład w Farmacyi Teodora...

The process of producing vessels of white porcelain is regarded as being exceptionally difficult, since, as it is baked in a furnace, small particles can easily permeate inside, and they can dye the porcelain forms, thus disrupting the whole process. One of the most outstanding contemporary hakuji artist is Manji Inoue (born 1929), the Japanese creator who was awarded, in 1995, with the honourable title of “The Living National Treasure” (Ningen Kokuhō).

The present anonymous painting depicts the famous Grotta del Cane [it. Cave of Dogs]. It is located near Naples, by Lake Agname. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the cave was one of the tourist attractions of the region, visited by aristocrats and intellectuals travelling across Italy as part of so-called Grand Tour: a journey through the Old Continent, which was a traditional stage in the education of European elites.