Botanical exactitude

As I spend much of my life in a flower bed, bottom up, I rarely consciously make the connection between the flowers that I grow in my garden and their more elevated associations, in particular their role in Christian art. Only when I visit art galleries or churches am I forcibly reminded that gardens and wild flowers appear again and again in paintings, as well as featuring prominently in the plastic and applied arts.

This is hardly surprising, since flowers were both comprehensible and universal symbols in preliterate times, and have remained enduring signs of Man’s appreciation of the beauty and variety of God’s creation. This was brought home to me the other week in Krakow in southern Poland, when I went to reacquaint myself with the Art Nouveau stained glass and murals of Stanislaw Wyspianski.

Wyspianski (1869–1907) is not a name to conjure with in this country, more’s the pity, except among his compatriots living here, of course. Where he is known, it is usually as the author of The Wedding, written in 1901, which earned him the reputation as the first modern Polish playwright. But Wyspianski, who was born and spent most of his short, illness-dogged life in Krakow, was much more than a prolific playwright: he was poet, city planner, furniture designer, illustrator, sculptor, printmaker and painter. He attained the Polish ideal of a deeply religious patriot, at a time when Krakow was part of Galicia, a province of Austria–Hungary. He was a prominent member of the Young Poland movement. This year, the centenary of his death, has seen a clutch of celebratory events in Krakow.

My Polish being still shamefully rudimentary, I couldn’t really join in with those, but I sought him out in the churches of central Krakow.