A Lisowczyk? Degrees of Polish
The proposed allegorical origin disturbed some scholars. Art historian Zdzislaw Zygulski refused to abandon the idea of a real model into whom allegorical meaning could later be read, if desired.
He rejected Held's idea of a generalized Miles Christianus and questioned the rider's supposed Hungarian connections. In a detailed and well-documented study of 1965, Zygulski pointed out that Rembrandt produced two distinct types of paintings of people in costume: artificial compositions of models dressed up for the occasion in clothing and accoutrements from his own large collection, and real portraits, which were remarkably accurate. He thought that The Polish Rider, which he still called Lisowczyk, belonged to the latter category.Zygulski began by admitting that the subject could not be an actual Lisowczyk but proposed he was a Polish light cavalryman - a “Cossack” in seventeenth-century Polish - perhaps a Pole, Ukrainian, Walachian, Tatar, or other nationality. Zygulski stressed the “Cossack” label and the fact that “here served also the people from the Ukraine for whom war constituted the proper element, the source of support and fulfillment.” He noted that the rider's steed was specifically Polish, light, and not of the heavier western European or even Hungarian variety, and that it was ridden in a specifically Polish style, upright but leaning slightly forward, and bent at the knee.
Zygulski added, about the horseman: like him, Poles visiting western Europe often imitated men there and wore their hair long and shaved their moustaches; the equestrian sported a fur cap called a kuchma/kuczma, which was most common in Poland and Ukraine, less so in Hungary; his coat was a joupane/zupan, most probably of closely woven silk, a kind of soft armour specific to Poland and its eastern neighbours; and his arms and especially his bow were unique to Poland (the bow of a type, Zygulski maintained, made only by Armenian artisans in Lviv/Lwow).
Zygulski concluded that the saddle, harness, and brass stirrups were all of the Polish and Cossack style. Moreover, the horsetail standard was a typical bunchuk/bunczuk, widely used in the Commonwealth and adopted under Ottoman influence; these also were supposedly more popular in Poland than in Hungary.Thus, all in all, Rembrandt's horseman was an exact replica of a “Polish light cavalryman,” which the artist could never have made up or created from his own collection of artefacts without a real model. Zygulski hinted that the artist had a “well-known” interest in Polish matters through his family connections (his sister-in-law's husband was Polish), which perhaps inspired him. Thus the “Lisowczyk” was a real person and no generic Miles Christianus and most certainly not Hungarian. All allegorical interpretations of the picture, he concluded, must be relegated to secondary place.23
Zygulski's research was generally well received by Western art historians, but at least one had concerns. Mieczyslaw Paszkiewicz, a Polish emigre scholar living in London, acknowledged Zygulski's detailed knowledge of Polish arms and costume but disagreed about the painting's uniqueness. He maintained that Zygulski's “either/or” approach to Rembrandt's pictures of people in costume was too rigid, and he pointed out that the painter sometimes copied and developed other artists' work, and that artefacts in the picture also occurred in some of his other, non-Polish creations; at the same time depictions of Poles in long hair, even in western Europe, were very rare, thus indicating a non-Polish model.
Paszkiewicz suggested that the picture was based on the drawings of Stefano della Bella and a Polish embassy (that of Opalinski and Leszczyns- ki) of 1645 passing through Holland on its way to Paris, which Rembrandt, with his lively interest in things exotic, might have witnessed. (Della Bella drew this same embassy.) Thus Rembrandt was painting probably not a commissioned portrait of a particular Pole, but rather a kind of composite genre scene, very Polish, but not an exact likeness of a “Polish light cavalryman,” much less a “Lisowczyk” of the 1630s.
Paszkiewicz concluded that the painting would be better titled “A Rider in Polish Costume.”24Needless to say, Paszkiewicz's arguments did not in the least convince Zygulski. The eminence responded immediately, arguing, for example, that the war-hammer (nadziak) was a weapon specific to lieutenants of the Polish light cavalry, just as the mace or “bulava” (a term in several Slavonic languages) was specific to the hetman, and that while certain elements from the picture might be found elsewhere in Rembrandt's wuvre, or in images that the painter may have seen, such as certain Persian miniatures, it was the detailed combination that was unique to the rider and marked him as definitely Polish. Moreover, the Polish embassy to Paris had passed through Holland some ten years prior to the artist's work (c. 1655) on the rider, which seemed a rather long time for the artist to remember such details. Thus the work remained likely a portrait of a real person rather than a copy of another artist's work or some kind of genre composition. Moreover, Zygulski concluded, Polish costume and armament changed very little between the 1620s and the 1660s, and thus Lisowczyk was not as far-fetched a name as it might seem.25