MATEYKO, JAN. - Polish painter, b. at Cracovia on 30 June 1838, d. there on 1 Oct. 1893. He studied at Cracovia, at Monaco di Baviera (1859-60), and at Vienna (1860), then returned to Cracovia, where he spent the rest of his life.
He painted sacred subjects and scenes from Polish history, aptly interpreting the taste of his milieu and generation and displaying excellent powers of representation, expressed in a serious chromatic language that at times seems linked to the models of the sixteenth-century Venetian masters. M. was also a portrait painter. Among his works are the frescoes in the church of Maria Vergine at Cracovia (1889-93). Of his grand paintings, the best known are: La battaglia di Grinswald (1878), in the Lacheta of Varsavia; Omaggio del duca di Prussia al re Sigismondo di Polonia (1882), in the Museo nazionale at Cracovia; and Giovanni III Sobieski alla battaglia di Vienna (1883), in the Museo Vaticano at Rome.