"The most beautiful woman of her age". The "Second Helena Trojan". Historians and writers have never restrained themselves when they had to describe the extraordinary beauty of Barbara Radziwiłłówna. It turns out that these praises are not very firmly embedded in reality.
The myth about the beautiful Barbara has settled in Polish culture for good. For two centuries, it has been strengthened by every novel, play or film production touching the theme of the great romance between the Polish king and a young widow of a Lithuanian magnate family. Barbara lived in a time from which thousands of letters, a number of various chronicles, leaflets and iconographic sources have survived. One would expect the "other Helen" to deserve a mention in at least a few places.
Not long before that, poets, chroniclers and state dignitaries wrote extensively about the beauty of Sigismund the Old's wives. The appearance of the first wife of Sigismund Augustus, Elżbieta Habsburżanki, also aroused considerable interest. Meanwhile, Barbara's beauty went almost unnoticed.
Beautiful eyes, but a Lithuanian face
"The composition of her body and face made her so beautiful that people out of jealousy despised her innocence," one source said. "The hands and eyes are beautiful, but the Lithuanian face" - recorded in another report, by German authorship. There is also a panegyric according to which Barbara was "gloriously beautiful". And these three period sources are pretty much everything.
Barbara Radziwiłłówna in a portrait made in the workshop of Łukasz Cranach the Younger shortly after her death.
Contrary to, for example, the young Bona , few people were so interested in Barbara's appearance that they could put their observations on paper. More details can be drawn from Radziwiłłówna's portraits. These, however, were created mostly decades or even hundreds of years after her death.
Zmyślona beauty
Barbara is the most beautiful from the paintings from the 19th century. The one from the sixteenth-century paintings - made during her lifetime or shortly after she passed away - looks much more ordinary. She must have had a rather long but straight nose, an oval face, narrow arched eyebrows and a small, subtle mouth.
She was also most likely a blonde with a very fair complexion. All these features are repeated in various portraits, so they could not be the artist's invention. One more thing repeats itself:the eyes. Big, dark and piercing with its penetrating gaze.
Great mystery
The eyes were talked about much more than the beauty of Barbara. Critics in the future will even begin to argue that these eyes were used to cast spells. Allegedly, thanks to them, Radziwiłłówna was able to ensnare other men. Such opinions became very popular, so people must have felt that there was a big secret behind Barbara's success.
And that beauty is not enough to solve the mystery. Hanna Widacka, an expert in the portraits of Barbara Radziwiłłówna, stated slightly intrigued that the images depicting her "do not convince the viewer of the dazzling beauty of the model"
Just… pretty?
Maybe it wasn't the painters' incompetence at all, but the fact that Barbara was… pretty. Not strikingly beautiful like Trojan Helena, but pretty.
Men were attracted primarily by their position and personality. She was direct, outspoken, and made little to the etiquette and rigid norms of behavior that characterized sixteenth-century courts.
Contrary to appearances, it is difficult to find a more optimistic conclusion. In fact, all biographers to date have seen Barbara primarily as her body.
Two contemporary portraits of Barbara Radziwiłłówna.
Zbigniew Kuchowicz ascribed all of her successes to "alcoholic skills". Another historian, Jerzy Besali, blurted out that she probably was a "stupid straightforward Lithuanian woman".
If Barbara was really an ordinary pretty girl, then the secret of her success had to lie elsewhere. She had attracted the king's attention for what she was human, not because she had a good enough face.
Sources:
The article is based on the sources, literature and materials that I collected while working on my next book. "Ladies of the Golden Age", telling the stories of Bona Sforza, Barbara Radziwiłłówna and Anna Jagiellonka, can be purchased at empik.com.
- Baliński Michał, Diaries about Queen Barbara, Zygmunt August's wife , vol. I-II, J. Glücksberg, 1837.
- Bartoszewicz Julian, The character of Barbara Radziwiłłówna her illness and death , Polish Bookshop by A. Dzwonkowski, 1864.
- Besala Jerzy, Barbara Radziwiłłówna and Zygmunt August , Świat Książki, 2007.
- Kuchowicz Zbigniew, Barbara Radziwiłłówna , Łódź Publishing House, 1989.
- Molenda Maria, Splendide Vestitus. On the importance of clothing at the royal court of the Jagiellonians in the years 1447-1572 , typescript of the work being prepared for publication.
- Przezdziecki Aleksander, Polish Jagiellonians in the 16th century. Pictures of the family and court of Zygmunt I and Zygmunt August of Polish Kings , vol. I-V, Printing House of the Jagiellonian University, 1868-1878.
- Widacka Hanna, On the pictorial and graphic images of Queen Barbara Radziwiłłówna , "Kronika Zamkowa", No. 33 (1996).
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A different version of the above article appeared in the latest issue of "Newsweek Historii" (9/2014).