The 18th century was a time of enormous cultural, political and societal upheaval for the West. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was a period of decline that was completed by the partitions. However, reducing the 18th-century history of the Polish-Lithuanian state to a mere falling into political non-existence would be a simplified and thus false…
It was a type of competition, not to say casting, for a wife for the King of France. The list consisted of one hundred princesses. Brief comments on age, religion and origin were written next to each of the candidates. by Maciej Forycki In 1725 Marie Leszczyńska, hailing from a Polish noble family, became…
Moving from little Belluno to Venice – was this a necessity for an ambitious painter of the Baroque era? Especially if we take into account the fact that his father was a local painter who used to paint the folds of cloaks worn by saints. Dolabella ended up in the workshop of Antonio Vassilacchi and…
The universal tendency to reproduce the model created by the Sun King – also discernible in seats of democratic power, the palaces of the mighty, or the individual microcosms imitating the Bourbon inheritance – cannot obscure the long-standing fascination of the Sarmatian world with Versailles. In many cases, we are dealing with the comprehensive assimilation…
Potatoes are among the most popular crops in the world. They were brought from America to Europe following the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, but they did not appear on tables until the 18th century. This was the same time that they also came to Poland, and poor peasant families played a surprisingly important role here….
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the heart of the continent was one of the largest and most diverse European countries of the early modern age (16th-18th centuries), including the territories belonging nowadays to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, as well as scraps of Russia and Estonia. The Commonwealth was created as a result of the…
