Page:Cracow - Lepszy.djvu/191

 ART FROM THE RENASCENCE they are highly praised by their contemporaries. An imitator of Rubens meets us in the person of the Bernardine Friar, Francis Leksycki (d. 1668), whose paintings are preserved in the church of his convent. Another Cracow painter of the period, John Alexander Tricius, who was a valiant soldier too, learned his art from Poussin in Paris and Jacob Jordaens in Antwerp; on returning home, he entered the royal service, and was court painter to Michael Korybut, John Sobieski, and Augustus II successively (1653-1692). The victory of King John Sobieski over the Turks at Chocini in 1673, he commemorated by a votive picture in St. Peter's Church.

The finest portrait of the seventeenth century is doubtless that of Bishop Trzebicki in the Franciscan Church, painted by Daniel Frecherus in 1664.—The work of the Cracow artist, Bogdan (Polish for Theodor) Lubieniecki (1653-1729) essentially belongs to the history of German art. The baroque church of St. Anne contains, as mentioned above, the paintings of a Swede, Charles Dankwart, besides those of two Italians, Innocentio Monti and Paul Pagani, and of a Polish nobleman, Eleutherius Siemiginowski, who was obliged to sign his pictures Eleuther only, in order not to incur the censure of the nobility for following such a mean, plebeian vocation, as that of painter was even then reputed to be. The most eminent representative of religious painting at Cracow in the eighteenth century was Simon Czechowicz (1689-1775). In his moral life a perfect Fra Angelico, in art a follower of Carlo Maratta, he was also the first Pole who founded a public school of painting at Warsaw. His pictures, to be found in the National Museum, in the Cracow High School of Art, in St. Anne's Church, &c., prove him to have been a man of no very strong individual powers, an eclectic, devoid of original conceptions, who devoutly followed masters and models such as Raffael, Rubens, Maratta, Guido Reni, Michel Angelo; his most original production is the Vision of St. John of Kenty, in the church of St. Florian. Besides him there is Thaddasus Konicz or Kunze (d. 1758), born at Cracow, who made a careful study of nature, showed more of original depth of conception,