2024-04-16
In this week's series of posts dedicated to lost/found art, we will take a look at the extremely interesting fate of an antique sculpture, Niobe's head from the collection of the Nieborów Palace. This work has travelled a very long way, from Rome via England and St Petersburg to Nieborów, a town 80 kilometres from Warsaw.
The Baroque palace in Nieborów, built in 1697, changed hands for many years before finally falling into the hands of the Radziwiłł family. It belonged to them between 1774 and 1945, and it is thanks to them that the building now houses magnificent paintings by European masters, a cabinet of prints and the famous head of Niobe. The Radziwills also founded the Majolica Manufactory, which is still run by the descendants of its founders.
In 1945 a museum was established on the family estate, which today is a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw. It includes the entire palace-garden complex, together with the Radziłów Palace in Nieborów and Helena Radziwiłł's Romantic Garden in Arkadia.
Today, the marble head of Niobe stands in the centre of the main hall of the Nieborów palace. This head was created by a Roman sculptor following the example of the Greek original from the 4th century BC. It is possible that, as shown by research carried out in 2005, it was a missing fragment of a headless statue found in the area of the Roman Villa Quintilles. What was its fate? Most probably, after the middle of the 18th century, it ended up in the collection of Tsarina Catherine, who bought the object from the famous English collector Lyde Browne. From there, it made its way to the collection of Helena Przeździecka Radziwiłł as a gift from the monarch.
In 1925, a young coachman Władysław Nowicki drove the later famous archaeologist Piotr Michałowski around the Radziwiłł estate. Michałowski was writing his doctoral thesis on Niobe images in art and shared with the boy information about an extremely valuable sculpture, then in the Temple of Diana in Arcadia. Perhaps thanks to this conversation, Nowicki decided to save Niobe's head in 1939. He wrapped it in rags and, at the sound of an explosion, carried it to the palace and hid it in a coal heap in the cellar. This uneducated employee of Prince Janusz Radziwill saved the most valuable item from the Nieborów collection. It was thanks to him that Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński was able to write in 1951: "In Nieborów, I began to wander through the rooms / and to leave Niobe, and to go down to her again, / to return and to escape through the unpleasant corridor (....)".