A publication on the work of Michelangelo Palloni has been published as part of the 'Studies and Materials' academic series of the Polonica Institute.

The title of the book Happy Heavens of the Italian Countries! is a paraphrased quotation from Pan Tadeusz, from Book III of the Umizga. Although in Adam Mickiewicz's work these words are put into the mouth of the foreign lover Telimena, shown in a distorting mirror, for the 17th-century Polish and Lithuanian nobility and magnates, Italian art was an ideal which for centuries constituted the taste of the citizens of the Crown and Lithuania. In turn, it was thanks to them that the talent of Michelangelo Palloni could develop.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth went through several devastating wars in the mid-17th century. Firstly, the wars with the Cossacks led by Khmelnytsky in the southern borderlands, and then the invasion of the Swedish king Charles Gustav, which resulted in the unprecedented plundering of cultural property, from monastery library collections to the furnishings of palace residences and the devastation of towns. The invasion of the eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Muscovite Tsar, which began at the same time, and the subsequent 5-year brutal occupation of Vilnius, completed this cataclysm of several years.

All this led to the political and economic weakening of the state, but it also obviously affected artistic creation, at the time based on artists coming primarily from Italy. As the Commonwealth began to rebuild, including in terms of artistic foundations, Michelangelo Palloni appeared in the Duchy of Lithuania in 1677. He was an artist trained in Florence and was brought in by the Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, Krzysztof Zygmunt Pac, to decorate the Camaldolese church in Pažaislis - today within the city limits of Kaunas.

Palloni's Italian art shone "in the middle of the wilderness", as if the golden age of Baroque of the Vasa era, destroyed by the Moscow occupation, was repeating itself. In 1685 he moved to Warsaw, although he was later also brought to Vilnius and Grodno. His paintings decorate, among others, the palace in Wilanów, the missionary chapel in Łowicz and the parish and Reformed churches in Węgrów. But Palloni's works in Pažaislis and the decoration of the St Casimir's Chapel in Vilnius executed in 1691-1692 are considered the most representative of his work.

Michelangelo Palloni was the most outstanding creator of wall-fresco painting in the last quarter of the 17th century in the Republic of Poland.

We invite you to read an excerpt from the publication .

Author: Anna Sylwia Czyż, Piotr Jamski

Language editing: Małgorzata Jesiotr

Translation: Ewa Muszyńska-Faizi (English)

Year of publication: 2023

Number of pages: 196

Binding: soft

ISBN: 978-83-66172-75-3