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Barbara Radziwill

Grand Duchess of Lithuania Queen of Poland

Barbara_radziwill_16th_century_edited.jp

In the Matter
of the
King's Marriage

An historical novel
by
Jeffrey R. Prince

The interpretation of Barbara Radziwill’s life has changed with every century. So has the visualization of her and her environment. This miniature of her was concocted in the nineteenth century. The dress is from a sixteenth-century portrait of another woman by the circle of Lucas Cranach the Younger. The face is a nineteenth-century idealization of blond female beauty. Still this miniature suggests the impression Barbara would have made on her contemporaries around 1545 when she was first lady at the court in Vilnius.

Sigismund Augustus was raised to be the perfect renaissance prince. In fact, as a youth, he was a graceful dancer, champion jouster, and a scholar who could quote pages of Cicero and Virgil. At 23, the age at which he fell in love with Barbara, he would have been dark haired with an athletic build, favoring his Italian ancestors. This portrait relates to the next phase of his life. Completed in the 1550s, it was intended to publicize his maturity and wisdom as a ruler.

Done in the nineteenth century, this depiction of the other Radziwill palace in Vilnius shows that period’s fascination with ruins. In the last half of the sixteenth century, just after Barbara’s brother Nicholas Radziwill the red, or Rudy, had added the classical annex to the gothic castle he had inherited, it would have exemplified her generation’s enthusiasm for refashioning its culture on models from antiquity.

Lectures

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