Karton do polichromii Kościoła Mariackiego - Diabeł z głową ptaka

A companion to the open-jawed devil cartoon, this 1890 canvas depicts a devil with a bird's head — a hybrid creature from the iconographic tradition of grotesque demonic imagery that stretches back through Hieronymus Bosch to medieval manuscript illumination. Matejko's choice of a bird-headed devil draws on a rich symbolic vocabulary: birds associated with deception, night, or carrion (ravens, owls) were traditional attributes of demonic figures in Christian iconography. The polychrome program at St Mary's Basilica required a range of demonic and angelic figures to populate the Gothic decorative field, and Matejko designed each with individual iconographic specificity. His deep familiarity with medieval art — accumulated through decades of research in Kraków's churches, libraries, and archives — informed every design decision in this commission. The cartoon would have been used directly by his workshop painters, making the precision of these working documents essential. The National Museum in Kraków holds the series of cartoons as a major document of nineteenth-century Polish monumental art.

The bird-headed devil presents specific formal challenges: the transition from human or semi-human body to avian head requires convincing anatomical invention. Matejko handles this by treating the junction as a costume-like boundary, the neck and plumage merging with surrounding decorative elements. The design must be forceful enough to read as part of an architectural program, so color and line are used with the directness of monumental rather than easel painting.