Strącenie Faetona na plafonie w pałacu Pod Krzysztofory. O możliwych inspiracjach dla przedstawienia mitu o nierozważnym synu Heliosa

THE FALL OF PHAETON ON THE PLAFOND CEILING AT KRZYSZTOFORY PALACE. ON THE POSSIBLE INSPIRATIONS FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF THE MYTH OF HELIOS’ IMPRUDENT SON In the finest of all rooms in Krzysztofory Palace, the Baldassare Fontana Room located on the so-called piano nobile, there is a ceiling stucco depicting the dramatic scene of the fall of Phaeton and his solar chariot. The authorship of this piece is uncertain. In the older literature on the subject, we find a deep conviction that the piece was done by Baldassare Fontana (1661–1733), an Italian-born baroque artist known e.g. as the creator of the magnificent decorations in St Anne’s Church in Kraków. Allegedly, Fontana produced the stucco in 1702 or 1704, when he was living in Kraków, and the work was commissioned by Anna Wodzicka, the then owner of Krzysztofory Palace. One of the hypotheses says that it was a monumental satire on the recently dethroned Polish king, Augustus II. More recently, however, researchers tended to date the stucco to a later period (after 1726), thus questioning Fontana’s authorship. The present paper does not settle the question of the piece’s authorship; instead, it presents the cultural background behind it, as well as discusses the artist’s potential inspirations, i.e. other representations of the fall of Phaeton motif. The paper comprises two parts. The first part deals with the question of how popular the myth of Phaeton could be among Cracovians. It, therefore, discusses the literature which was either published, or simply accessible to the Kraków audience in the Modern Period (16th–18th cent.), and in which the story of Helios’ son driving the solar chariot was presented in considerable detail (mostly, the various editions, translations and adaptations to Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses). This part of the paper also deals with the symbolism of Phaeton as a character in the literature written in that period. The second part of the paper discusses the chances of the artist being influenced by other visual representations. Particular attention is paid to the similarities between the stucco ceiling decoration and the motif of the fall of Phaeton and his chariot as it is depicted in one of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s (1475–1564) drawings which became very popular and was often copied by numerous artists (mainly chalcographers, but also medallists and sculptors). The artist who produced the stucco in Kraków probably made use of that drawing, too.