Golgotha

Jan Styka studied at the Imperial and Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, then in Rome (thanks to the Prix de Rome scholarship), Paris, Kraków (under Jan Matejko). After his studies, he settled in Lviv. In 1895, he travelled to Palestine. Since 1900, he lived permanently in Paris, from where he took numerous trips, including to the United States, Italy and Greece. The work purchased for the Szczecin collection in 2013 is a sketch for the painting Golgota [Golgotha] (1896). The painting is exhibited in a specially built pavilion in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California (the panorama is 60 metres long and 15 metres high, presented with multimedia effects). Before creating this work, Styka went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1895). The sketch in the Szczecin collection covers the central part of the panorama, where the action at Golgotha takes place. Behind the city walls, one can see the road stretching to Bethlehem and the Jordan Valley. This fragment does not include the vast landscapes on both sides of the canvas, depicting the Moabite mountain range and the Dead Sea streambed. Nor does it include the walls of Jerusalem in the foreground, recreated according to descriptions from two thousand years ago.The artist has chosen the most solemn part of Christ's suffering, that is, the moment before he was stretched on the cross when the crowd's expressions of contempt can be heard all around. To the right, in the distance, stands Mary, supported by two people; kneeling and weeping, Mary Magdalene can be seen next to her. Closer to Christ is Simon of Cyrene, who helped him carry the cross to Golgotha, and behind him is a Roman soldier reading the death sentence. Next to him stand Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who, after his death, took Christ's body down from the cross and buried it in the tomb. On the left, next to Christ, stand the judges and nobles. All details immortalized on the sketch and introduced into the painting were the result of historical studies, which Styka conducted during his trip to the Holy Land.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska