Candlesticks of Christianity, sketch

This preparatory sketch for Siemiradzki's major canvas Candlesticks of Christianity (also titled Torches of Nero or Nero's Torches) dates to 1876, the year the finished painting was exhibited and caused a sensation across Europe. The subject — Christians bound to poles and set alight in Nero's gardens to illuminate a nocturnal entertainment — drew directly on the writings of Tacitus and was a subject of intense interest in the context of nineteenth-century Catholic revival and the widespread sympathy for Polish Catholic identity under Russian suppression. Siemiradzki was himself a practising Catholic and the theme of martyrdom resonated personally as well as professionally. Now in the National Museum in Warsaw, this sketch reveals the compositional thinking behind the finished work — the placement of figures, the distribution of light sources, and the spatial organisation of a complex multi-figure scene. Preparatory sketches of this quality were collected and exhibited in their own right as evidence of an artist's process.

The sketch is executed in oil on canvas with a looser, more exploratory touch than the finished work. Tonal masses are blocked in with broad strokes; the figures are placed schematically but the essential light-and-shadow logic — torchlit bodies against a dark night sky — is already established. The warm orange-red of the flames reads against cooler tones in the crowd, a colour relationship that the finished painting would develop in full detail.