Copernicus, by Jan Matejko

This is the Jan Matejko exhibition at the National Gallery. It's the first show they've had here by a Polish artist and it is, of course, marvellous. But before we go in, there's something I wanted to show you, some maps, because we need some context here. So this is Europe in 1650 and this big country here, stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea, that is Poland, or rather the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth, a shared empire with enormous reach and prestige. And this is Europe again in 1919, so just after the First World War, when the Congress of Versailles decided on the new shape of Europe. And this is Poland, a much smaller country, but it's still there. And then we get to this, Europe in around 1800, so between the two other maps. And what do we see about here? Nothing. Poland is gone. This huge chunk here, that's Russia. This chunk here, that's Prussia. And this chunk is Austria. But Poland has disappeared. The partitioning of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria, completed in 1795, erased an entire nation from the map of Europe. For 123 years, Poland didn't exist. And that's where Matejko comes in. In those 123 years, how did the Polish people survive as a country? What held them together? Well, there were three things really. First, there was language, the notoriously difficult Polish. If you spoke Polish, this was your nation. And then there was religion. The Poles were fiercely Catholic, unlike the Orthodox Russians on one side and the Prussian Protestants on the other. And then finally, there was art. And in particular, there was Jan Matejko. Matejko was a history painter. He remembered events of national significance and he gave them a face. It's one of art's great jobs. Imagine if Holbein had never painted Henry VIII, so he had no idea what he looked like. Would the Tudor age have played the huge role that it plays in the British imagination if we didn't know what Henry VIII looked like? Of course not. And it's the same with Matejko. He's as famous as he is because his huge achievement was to picture things of which there were no pictures. It's what he's doing here in his famous portrayal of the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. Mikołaj Kopernik in Polish. Making his momentous discovery that the Earth goes round the Sun and not the other way round. It's one of the eureka moments in world science. Now this happened early in the 16th century, so sometime before 1543. So obviously there were no camera crews or news teams around to record it all. But three centuries later, in 1873, Jan Matejko, Poland's greatest painter, produced this stirring and dramatic record of the event. This is how he imagined it. Matejko made a brilliant career for himself, evoking and illustrating big moments in Polish history. The Battle of Grunwald, where the Polish and Lithuanian forces finally defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1410. The Battle of Vienna in 1683, when Jan Sobieski stopped the advance into Europe of the Ottoman Turks. Because of Matejko, the missing moments of Polish history were no longer missing. This is different because it's not about war. It's about another kind of heroism. The heroism of science. High above the city of Frombork, whose gothic cathedral looms up behind him, Copernicus has been studying the stars. That big lump of wood there is what's called a triquetrum, a medieval instrument for measuring the altitude of heavenly bodies. Strewn around Copernicus are his books, his scientific instruments, and a diagram showing his great discovery, the planets circling the sun. And at the centre, the man himself, Copernicus, transformed into a romantic hero, the poldark of astronomy. Young, handsome, looking up at the sky in this dramatic gesture of discovery, while a powerful shaft of divine light picks him out and spotlights him. A blast of light so forceful, it's blowing back his hair. That's God. God is bathing Copernicus in a divine light. Why? Because Catholicism, of a particularly fierce and raw variety, was one of the glues that held the nation together when there was no nation. In the years after Copernicus's momentous discovery, the Catholic Church came out against this new view of the solar system and branded it heretical. So one of the things Matejko is doing here is making clear that God was never against Copernicus. God was always on Copernicus's side. But I think there's even more going on here. The organisers of this show say that the painting records a conversation between Copernicus and God. That Copernicus has just made his great discovery and he's telling God about it, says the National Gallery. But I don't think that's right. I think the role of God here is more direct and meaningful. Copernicus isn't talking to God about a discovery he's already made. Copernicus is being buffeted by divine enlightenment. Thrown against the parapet like a man caught in a car's headlights. He's being given a divine gift. A true understanding of the heavens. Why? Because then and now, God is on Poland's side.