The current conservation of the Water Palace in the Warsaw Łazienki entails a number of issues. The latter include questions which do not concern conservation sensu stricto. Nonetheless, they remain components of the problem under examination because, apart from a widely comprehended technical aspect, they involve a nontechnical domain, connected with the visual reception of the historical monument. The author has in mind certain corrections of the present state of the Water Palace, the most important being the reconstruction of the paintings destroyed during the war and located on the ceilings of the Bacchus and Bath rooms and Solomon’s hall. Władysław Tatarkiewicz maintained that these paintings should not be restored. It was his belief that the decoration of the first two rooms was sufficiently lavish, especially considering that it included bas reliefs and Dutch tiles. Furthermore, he regarded the reconstruction of the paintings in Solomon’s hall as dangerous since, in his opinion, the merit of the works by Bacciareli consisted more of their colour than form. The author finds it difficult to agree with such a view, and points to the facts that the impact of the paintings was not restricted to their colour. It involved also other values, connected with the programme of the ornamentation of the entire Palace interior. Those other values are, in the first place, a formal aspect, comprehended as a compositional common element of stylistically different interiors, based on the figurai murals on the ceilings and walls. In the second place, the contentual stratum acted as a carrier of allegorical symbolics and justified the distinct embellishment of the above mentioned interiors. The enormous significance of the contents of the paintings follows from the relation between their worth and the architectionic decoration. Architecture dominates over the paintings and sculptures only as regards form. It suffices to examine the Ball room, Solomon’s hall or the Rotunda from a point of view of their contents, to reverse the hierarchy of the rank of particular elements of the decoration. Architecture becomes relegated to the role of a backdrop for the paintings and sculptures, which appear as direct exponents of the contents, the servile position of architecture in this instance is expressed also in the role which it should assume vis a vis the atmosphere and symbolics of the message communicated by the sculptures and paintings. The only approporiate frame for the serious and existential contents of the murals in the Ball room as well as for the message of the fireplace sculptures should be classical architecture which stresses their solemnity. The same holds true for Solomon’s hall where the paintings by Bacciareli, which praise the ancient ruler’s wisdom, to which he owed his fame and infinite riches, were accompanied by lavish gilt decorations whose grandeur announced that the path to wealth and power leads through wisdom only. The essential role of the above presented relations becomes apparent particularly today when, paradoxically, the paintings are absent; it remains especially legible in Solomon’s hall where many motifs were borrowed from the Baroque. The moment we enter this room, after having gone through the classically simple and tranquil Ball room, we are struck by the richness of the embellishments, unencountered in other interiors. The ensuing impression is that of unjustified contrast which leads to the question about the reason for the difference between the austere and restrained Ball room and the opulence of Solomon’s hall. The answer is quite simple. Today, the lavishness of the decorations appears to be unwarranted due to the absence of the paintings whose contents corresponded to the nature of the decorations. One of the themes was, after all, the riches of Solomon. The allegorical symbolics, originally produced by the contents of the murals and their surrounding, is missing. We are left with an opulent frame which remains a sui generis dissonance, unless it becomes justified. This is the „unnecessary singularity” of the reconstructed Water Palace and, at the same time, in the author’s estimation, a sufficiently strong argument in favour of the reconstruction of paintings in Solomon’s hall. In the case of the Bacchus and Bath room, the factor decisive for the need for such a reconstruction is of a formal nature, and stems from the very function of the paintings, which were one of the prime and indissoluble components of the specific form of decoration of the royal residence. The term — the royal residence of King Stanisław Poniatowski — is not accidental. The court artists intended to produce such decorations which would, in turn, create a formal and contentual uniformity of the interiors, within a single style that would be the outcome of a harmonious coexistence of all the basic branches of the plastic arts. In doing so, they implemented a creative conception generated by the extremely sophisticated artistic taste and philosophical reflections of Stanisław August himself. Let the missing paintings be recreated, therefore, in order to restore also the full brilliance of the royal conception. We owe this to a monarch who remains so frequently underestimated, but who made a great and lasting contribution to Polish culture.
