2024-04-25
The Wawel tapestries ordered, purchased and imported by Sigismund II August had a very complicated history. The collection of artistic fabrics, consisting of 138 pieces today, was travelling both in the country and abroad. When and how did it end up in Canada? We will try to answer this question in the article below.
The Wawel arrasy (Polish: Arrasy wawelskie) are the largest collection of 16th-century fabrics in Poland. 136 tapestries are located in the Wawel Royal Castle, one fabric is presented in the Royal Castle in Warsaw, and another in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This collection was made in the years around 1550-1560 and designed by Dutch artists. These tapestries were first publicly exhibited in 1553 on the occasion of the wedding of Zygmunt August to Catherine of Habsburg. A very high artistic level characterizes them, wool, silk, silver and gold threads were used to produce them. The fabrics vary in size and subject. The themes can be grouped into series: biblical series, landscape and animal series, coat of arms and monogram series.
What is interesting, is the tapestry entitled "Paradise Happiness" has 42 square metres. A square metre of such a composition was created in about 2 months.
In November 1795 as many as 157 pieces of tapestries were robbed on the order of tsarist authorities and taken to St. Petersburg. It was not until the peace treaty of 1921 (the Peace of Riga) that the process of recovering the works started. The whole collection was recovered from the Soviet side in 1928.
In September 1939, in connection with the fear of German attack, another journey of our national treasure began, the tapestries travelled to Romania, France, and Great Britain up to Canada. They returned from overseas only in 1961, before that the Polish Government in Exile together with the Prime Minister of Quebec (a staunch anti-communist) defended the collection from falling into Stalin's hands.
At the moment, the collection is looked after by Wawel Textile Conservation Studio.