Today's Painting Of The Day:

today's painting of the day:

"Stańczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk" (polish Stańczyk w czasie balu na dworze królowej Bony wobec straconego Smoleńska)

artist: Jan Matejko

(you don't have to read, just you finding this piece neat is enough for me)

there're many things I love about this. Stańczyk is already an important character in polish culture. a character for the satiric stories to make fun of politics and society, and yet in this picture it's clear it's not a funny story.

we still can look around more and see people having fun in a party, and if you don't know the name of the painting and who's this man you might ask "why are you sad? why don't you join fun? what could make even the court jester feel so low?". but when you know you just sign and think "you too? me too."

purpose of court jester is to entertain people, usually they're shown to be fools and quite sassy, but Stańczyk isn't. he's intelligent person that educates people.

even if he wasn't you know it's really bad when even the jester feels desparate and hopeless (their role to make people happier even irl),

when everyone but THE jester don't care (selfish rich people who don't care until something bad happens diectly to them, when even usually foolish jester and own character Stańczyk who's a voice of reason know how bad things are)

red is a very emotional and passionate color. but it rarely shows sadness. even if the painting isn't really dynamic, it's rather quite, a person just sitting all alone in the room, listening only to his own singing and music from near ball

and it works so well here. you see his burning feelings, that moment when you know you're SO fucked that can't get yourself even to the mental breakdown because you're SOO fucked that stressing out won't do anything, things are already bad and you can do nothing about it. you aren't even afraid of the future and mentally ready to probably die, you're sad about it, but sucked it up, you're kinda scared of how ignorant people are, but it makes you feel just powerless, you wish you felt bad about people who're going to suffer

but all your negative feelings are mixing together and become nothing but feel of deep dissapointment, depression, sorrow

you feel that the only what left to you is just sit. and be sad and hopeless. stepping back without any chance to step forward.