Wizerunki Michała Kazimierza Paca – przegląd ikonografii hetmana litewskiego i wojewody wileńskiego

W artykule zebrano i omówiono portrety Michała Kazimierza Paca, hetmana wielkiego litewskiego i wojewody wileńskiego, jednej ze znakomitszych postaci swoich czasów. Wizerunki Paca nie doczekały się do tej pory szerszych omówień. W artykule ukazano je w kontekście awansów na kolejne urzędy, co wymagało podjęcia szeregu działań z autokreacją. Jej częścią były też herby i eksponowanie powiązań genealogicznych. W artykule omówiono całą znaną ikonografię hetmana, a także wzajemne zależności pomiędzy portretami.

The article deals with the little-known portraits of Michał Kazimierz Pac. They demonstrate that he did take proven self-aggrandizement measures used by others to portray themselves as public figures and as individual full of virtues. However, Pac concentrated on his soldierly service, disregarding his offices of the Vilnian voivode, possibly because he considered them prestigious but not so much important as his laudable hetmanly deeds on the battlefield. Also, there are no private or collective portraits of Michał Kazimierz Pac in his iconography, other than the frescos from the church in Pożajście, although these forms of artistic communication were known and used in the Polish and Lithuanian Commonwealth. The most likely explanation of these two “gaps” is that Pac never married and devoted whole his life to the military career and to the building of the church under the invocation of St. Peter and St. Paul in the Antokol in Vilnius as his monument. Pac took care of his promotion after earning the field baton, which event started his further career. The compositional scheme he chose, codified by the lost full-body portrait by Daniel Schulz, was augmented in time by the addition of pieces of armor. This pattern was later repeated a number of times, growing in new attributes of the hetman’s office and in military staffage, as seen in the portrait from the Antokol church. The equestrian portrait (woodcut) of the hetman is an outstanding and early milestone in the formation of his public image.