Virtutis invidia comes, czyli o Rotundzie w Łazienkach Królewskich

This article presents a letter previously unknown to researchers of the Łazienki Palace by Stanisław Trembecki, the court poet, to Stanislaus Augustus, on the basis of which a reinterpretation of the Rotunda’s ideological programme has proven possible. It so turns out that a significant role in this programme must have been played by the non-extant image of the Medusa that, personifying Jealousy, would have exerted negative influences on all rules gathered in the Rotunda. One of these sovereigns, most obviously, was Stanislaus Augustus himself, personifed as Courage. The four Polish monarchs and Roman emperors were supposed to be the rules with whom the last king of Poland compared himself, each of them evoking a specific virtue. As such, the programme expressed in the Rotunda presents the exceptionaly popular motif in the art of the later half of the 18th century of exemplum virtutis.