Images of People Who Write – Authors and Their Works

How many faces will you recognise? No, it’s not an online quiz, but a presentation at the National Museum in Krakow. The exhibition at the Emeryk Hutten-Czapski Museum presents faces of writers, poets and scholars as depicted in old tomes, atlases and maps. Prints dating from between the 16th and 19th centuries show authors of texts written between the antiquity and the present day, including individuals still present in the public consciousness (such as Homer and Virgil) as well as those now only familiar to scholars. We will take a fascinating journey through the centuries of European culture and encounter poets, novelists, Catholic saints, great religious reformers, astronomers, historians, geographers, cartographers, medics and explorers. As well as realistic portraits, the pages of tomes from different eras are also filled with images entirely unlike the people they depict. (dd)