Of the two effigies of John III in the collection of the Church and Hospice of St Stanislaus in Rome, one shows him following a model belonging to the most widespread, while the other is a real rarity. The work is exceptional both for the attire of the portrayed and for the presence of a crown, rarely depicted on painted images of the king. The physiognomy attracts attention; the facial features, indicative of a man in his prime, are painted vividly, even bluntly. Moreover, the painting is extremely interesting due to the class of the painter - on close inspection, we can see bravura solutions attesting to the artist's high skills.

John III is dressed in chainmail, which rarely appears in his portraits without other elements of armour. It is often covered additionally with caracenas, a type of armour popularised during the reign of King Sobieski. The chainmail is decorated with four gilded clasps and three masks - a lion on the sides and (most likely) reproducing an eagle's head in the centre. The motifs of these animals, referring to the Roman tradition, appear in other portraits of the king as decoration on the leather straps "pteryges" , at the epaulettes, and have an apotropaic meaning. The king's outer garment is a red delia lined with dark fur, with a fur collar, fastened at the neck with a long belt decorated with precious stones. Under the chainmail, Sobieski wears a deep red żupan. His sleeve is freely painted, with a rendering of the folds of the material and its texture, with bold contrasting of light and dark parts. Below, on the left forearm, a carving is visible. The king's right hand, shown against the dark background of the delia fur, is framed in bold foreshortened perspective. Sobieski embraces the cross crowning the closed crown with two fingers. The symbol of monarchical power rests on a cushion, closing the lower part of the composition on the left. The form of the crown is different from that immortalised in portraits of the king created by painters associated with his court, which may be an interesting motif for further iconographic and historical studies of the portrait.

The monarch's facial features suggest that the painting was created soon after the coronation, or was painted based on an image documenting Sobieski's appearance while he was still a Hetman. Looking for patterns for this work, attention should be drawn to the medal minted on the occasion of the victory at Chocim, by the Danzig minter Jan Höhn the younger ( https://baza.polonika.pl/pl/obiekty/portret-jana-iii-sobieskiego-w-kosciele-sw-stanislawa-w-rzymie#photo=81944 ). On the obverse of the medal, Great Hetman of the Crown Jan Sobieski is shown commanding his troops frontally. Underneath a delia with a wide fur collar he wears a chainmail, with two distinctive strings with decorative ends. It is hard to resist the impression of similarities between the medal and the portrait in question. We can see them, for example, in the arrangement of the delia, or the way the moustache is depicted, which is turned upwards sharply. The probable inspiration of the medal is also indicated by the chiaroscuro rendering of the facial features in the painting and its 'sharp' characterisation, which is perhaps the effect of transferring the plastic relief of the medal onto the canvas.

Józef Skrabski, the author of a study on the history and collections of St Stanislaus Church and Hospice in Rome, writes that in 1687 Bishop Jan Stanisław Zbąski donated portraits of John III and Maria Kazimiera to the church. The images were an important part of the ceremonies celebrated in the church in honour of St Casimir and St Stanislaus. However, no further information on the appearance of these paintings is known, so it cannot be stated unequivocally that this portrait of John III and the surviving portrait of Maria Kazimiera were the gift from Zbąski. In addition, it should be emphasised that the portrait of the Queen does not constitute a pair for the work in question, either in terms of painting or composition. The presence of the portrait of John III in question is confirmed in the collection of the Polish temple as late as 1935.

Returning to the iconography itself, it should be noted that, apart from the above-mentioned Höhn medal, we can also recognise this type of depiction in a little-known engraved portrait of John III by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718). ( https://baza.polonika.pl/pl/obiekty/portret-jana-iii-sobieskiego-w-kosciele-sw-stanislawa-w-rzymie#photo=81945 ). The print was made in 1683 in Italy, at the time of Sobieski's great victories at Vienna and Ostrzyhom, as the inscription under the image indicates. Although the engraving shows a narrower frame, the face and bust, the relationship with the painting from the church and hospice of St Stanislaus is undeniable. The engraving was made in 1683 and Zbąski's gift is dated four years later. It is therefore possible that the portrait in question had already been in Rome earlier. Could the Bishop of Przemyśl have donated an image representing the King's iconography from the time of his election and coronation to the church in 1687? Let us recall that in the 1680s an image of John III was formulated as an incarnation of Mars Sarmatian, with strong inspirations from the art of Roman antiquity. The question posed above must remain unanswered for the time being.

In conclusion, it is worth adding that the composition of the portrait from St Stanislaus' Church is repeated in a work held in the collection of the National Museum in Cracow ( https://baza.polonika.pl/pl/obiekty/portret-jana-iii-sobieskiego-w-kosciele-sw-stanislawa-w-rzymie#photo=81946 ). It is clearly of inferior artistic quality and was probably painted later, but it deserves attention because of the rarity of the iconography it depicts.

The portrait was restored in 2024, thanks to funding from the National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad POLONICA.

Technical data: canvas, oil
Dimensions: 97 x 70 cm (in frame 115 x 90 cm)