Madonna with Child – Copy of the fragment of the painting "Madonna with Child and Saints" by Bonifacio Veronese

This 1864 copy by Artur Grottger of a fragment from Bonifacio Veronese's "Madonna with Child and Saints" reveals the educational practices central to nineteenth-century Polish academic training. Grottger, born in Galicia in 1837, studied in Vienna and made extended visits to Venice and other Italian centres, where copying Old Masters formed a required part of the curriculum. Bonifacio de' Pitati (Bonifacio Veronese) was a sixteenth-century Venetian painter whose warm, sumptuous colouring attracted copyists and students throughout the subsequent centuries. By 1864 Grottger was already working on the cycle paintings — Polonia, Lithuania, War — for which he would become famous in Poland, but copying remained a practice that refined technical skill and deepened knowledge of colourist tradition. The National Museum in Kraków holds this work among its extensive collection of Grottger's output.

The oil on canvas technique follows Venetian tradition: warm ground, rich colour in the draperies, careful attention to the sfumato modelling of the Madonna's face. Grottger's copy would need to translate Veronese's layered Venetian glazing into a more direct nineteenth-century technique while preserving the warmth and luminosity of the original. The fragment format focuses on the most demanding figural element — the relationship between mother and child.