The soul within a flower : floral motifs in the art of Stanisław Wyspiański

The paper, in reference to the concept of criticism of art presented in The Philosophy of Art by Hippolyte Taine, analyses the work of Polish artist Stanisław Wyspiański. This sort of criticism implies that the piece of art is not only a result of the artists’s free will but numerous circumstances such as environment and society. According to this mode of interpretation, Wyspiański’s art contains the story of the past, present and future, and the country, people and art itself are presented as floral metaphors. All kinds of plants, especially flowers, are synonyms of beauty, identity, fragility, and paradoxically - the great power.