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 ART FROM THE RENASCENCE thickets, was appointed headmaster of the Cracow Academy of Arts. He had come from the older Cracow School, but later on he followed the latter-day tendencies in art, and became the leader of modern Polish impressionism. His appointment to the headmastership made it possible for him to engage new teachers, and thus by degrees to change the old School of Arts into a real Academy. His colleague there, Leon Wyczolkowski, who likewise treads the new paths, is chiefly distinguished by his symbolic pictures, subtly rendering various moods of mind, and by his portraits, which, by the excellent modelling of the bodies, give proof of his talent for observation of forms and colours in Jiving shapes. The mystical motive of death, which we meet very often in Wyczolkowski's pictures, faces us again, but intensified to a high degree in the works of the poet and painter, (d. 1907). With great originality and a spontaneous power sometimes approaching brutality, he combines archaic, nay even medieval, forms and designs. His symbolic conceptions—like most of his poetry—show him to be deeply influenced by the great romantic poet Slowacki (d. 1849), who, through the stages of Byronic melancholy and satire, Shakespearian tragi-comedy, and Calderonian religion, had passed, toward the end of his life, into a sort of patriotic mysticism, chiefly fostered by one Andrew Towianski, the founder of a sect temporarily including each of the greatest Polish poets (Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Krasinski), and called "Messianism," because proclaiming Poland "the Messiah of nations." With Wyspianski's poetry we are not directly concerned here; it follows Slowacki's in inspiration and diction—though distinctly protesting in one of the plays, "Deliverance," against the too exclusive domination of the nation's mind and actions by the ideals of the romantic poets, and attempting to form new elements of poetic style from the speech and song of the Polish peasants. Among Wyspianski's paintings, the stained windows in the Franciscan Church, with their gorgeous symbolism of colours and forms, alternating between the cold greenish paleness and stiffness of ascetic resignation and the wildly-curling