Tielman van Gameren (Thieleman van Gameren, Tylman Gamerski), Utrecht 1632–Warsaw 1706
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Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów

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Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów

Tielman van Gameren (Thieleman van Gameren, Tylman Gamerski), Utrecht 1632–Warsaw 1706 Przemysław Wątroba
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Tielman van Gameren spent the entire period of his professional maturity in Poland, becoming a leading architect in the Commonwealth in the second half of the seventeenth century, as proved by the numerous commissions and realisations, as well as ennoblement and nomination as a royal architect. In spite of that, his name and achievements have been rather curiously forgotten in the centuries that followed. Less than a hundred years ago, in the pages of the first Polish reference work on architects, Tielman van Gameren was accorded only a brief note devoid of basic biographical information which named merely eight designs attributed to him. It was only with the accidental discovery of Tielman’s architectural archive in 1934 that research into his works and life began, spearheaded by Tadeusz Makowiecki. A breakthrough in studies on Tielman occurred in the 1960s, with comprehensive studies by Stanisław Mossakowski, and culminated in a monograph published in 1973. At the turn of the millennium, the early days of the architect, his education, and workshop, became a subject of interest for several Dutch scholars, resulting in a Polish-Dutch exhibition of over a hundred works by Tielman, which took place at the Royal Castle in Amsterdam (2002) and then at the Royal Castle in Warsaw (2003).

Tielman van Gameren was born most likely in late June or early July 1632 in Utrecht, to haberdasher Jacob Janszon van Gameren. Orphaned in 1642 Tielman soon took up painting lessons (perhaps from his uncle Dirck van Gameren), and a while later probably studied at the school of mathematics (Duytsche Mathematique) of Leiden University, broadening his knowledge during private lessons with Nikolaus Goldmann (1611–65), a mathematician and lecturer in civil architecture and military construction. Tielman continued his education during sojourns abroad—to Germany, Italy, and other countries. Toward the end of the 1650s the future architect found himself in Venice, where he stayed for a longer while and gained a reputation as a battle painter and master of multi-figural compositions. It was probably in 1661 that the talented artist familiar with civil and military architecture met Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, who invited the Dutchman to the court of his father, Hetman Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski. Though little is known of the first two years of Tielman’s work in Poland, he would likely have found employment in the war against Moscow that was taking place at the time. In 1663 he engaged in preliminary work for Lubomirski residences at Łańcut, Janowiec, and Przeworsk. Two years later, when a political dispute between Jerzy Lubomirski and King Jan Kazimierz led to an open conflict, Tielman again exhibited his military talents, commanding the rebel artillery at the Battle of Mątwy (1666). When the exiled Hetman was forced out of Poland, Tielman joined his son in a brief sojourn to Italy. After his return, the architect designed an epitaph for Jerzy Sebastian (who died in 1669) and then the monastery of Brothers Hospitaller of Saint John of God in Warsaw, including a hospital and mausoleum of the Morsztyn family, and Lubomirski palace at Łańcut.

The Dutchman’s military services to the Commonwealth in wars against the Turks and the Cossacks won him the praise of Polish monarchs. Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki nominated Tielman as civil and military architect of the court in 1672, and Jan III Sobieski bestowed upon him the title of Cavalier of the Golden Spur in 1676—including the right to a family crest—and then made him a royal secretary. Only then—having obtained positions at the court ensuring appropriate dignity, and presumably also sufficient funds—did Tielman van Gameren marry the noblewoman Anna of Komorów and move in with her at Ujazdów, an estate of his protector and friend, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski.

In spite of his success at the court and royal commissions, Tielman’s relations with the Lubomirskis have not deteriorated; indeed, he produced multiple projects for them in the years that followed (including the design for a gravestone for Zofia Lubomirska née Opalińska in Końskowola, decorations for the wedding ceremony of Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski and Elżbieta Denhoff, and a design for the church of Benedictine Sisters in Radom). The 1680s saw more realisations for Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski: numerous designs for Ujazdów and Czerniaków and others for Lubomirski’s relatives (like Sandomierski Palace, for Aleksander Michał Lubomirski’s widow, or fortifications at the castle in Rzeszów, for Hieronim Augustyn Lubomirski). The period also saw Tielman submit designs for other magnates—the families of Gniński, Radziwiłł, and Kotowski.

In 1683 the architect most likely joined Sobieski’s expedition toward Vienna. We can assume that he distinguished himself in battle, which contributed to further commissions from the King (the church of the Capuchins and a new façade for the collegiate church of Saint John the Baptist in Warsaw, a wooden manor for the King). Two years later he received an indygenat, granting him full rights of a Polish noble. During the same year, he was tasked by the Paving Commission to conduct the first measurements of Warsaw streets selected for paving. The late 1680s and early 1690s were a period of intensive labour for Tielman, bearing fruit in his greatest artistic achievements: the church and monastery of the Bernardines including a hospital at Czerniaków (funded by Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, 1687–93), the Krasiński Palace in Warsaw (1687–8), and the collegiate church of Saint Anne in Cracow (1689). The same period saw the construction of the Warsaw church and monastery of the Sacramentines (1688–92), funded by Queen Marie Casimire as a votive offering in gratitude for her husband’s victory at Vienna. The domed temple raised by the architect in the New Town district is his most accomplished central structure, masterfully incorporating the conceptual program devised by the funder and the nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (which the Queen had brought to the Commonwealth) into the corpus of the church inspired by treatises of Renaissance theoreticians of architecture.

The decade that followed also provided the architect with lots of work and many prestigious commissions, most importantly from Queen Marie Casimire at Marywil (Marie Ville)—a metropolitan residential and commercial complex with an adjacent park, centred on a grand five-sided square (1691–5). The royal couple intended the project to serve as a monument of sorts to Sobieski’s triumph, with a church located centrally on the planned square as a likely place of eternal rest for the victor of Vienna. Eventually, only a modest chapel was built within the barrier dividing the square from the park. Based on Parisian royal squares, Marywil constituted a synthesis of a commercial and residential centre, a grand square, a suburban royal residence, and a commemorative temple, an enterprise that was uncommon in Europe.

While working on the aforementioned complex, Tielman conducted measurements on streets in the suburbs of Warsaw (1693), and then designed a tenement house for Councillor Jakub Schultzendorff at Długa Street (1698), concluded the rebuilding of the Ossoliński Palace (1695–6), and drew maps of Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski’s estates (1693, 1697–8). The period also saw him employed in extending Teofila Ludwika Lubomirska’s palaces in Lublin and Lubartów (1693), the Branicki Palace in Białystok (1697), and the Piarist monastery in Rzeszów.

In spite of his advanced age, the architect did not renounce military construction. A drawing from 1692 testifies to his involvement in designing the Trenches of the Holy Trinity over the Dniester River—a fortress raised by Grand Hetman of the Crown Stanisław Jan Jabłonowski as part of a defensive line at the eastern border of the Commonwealth. Tielman spent his final years concluding previous projects, such as the collegiate church of Saint Anne in Cracow, where he supervised the raising of the dome (1700); among other engagements, he also drew designs of a church for the Paulines of Warsaw (1700), a Bernardine monastery in Rzeszów (1701), and an altar of Saint Felicissima for the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw (funded by Cardinal Michał Radziejowski, 1704). By all accounts, the last major order he received from the Paving Commission concerned the reorganisation of the Old Town district of Warsaw and the construction of a complex of seventy new stalls to surround the town hall (since 1700).

Likely anticipating his impending demise, Tielman van Gameren prepared a testament on 10 May 1706, gifting a part of his estate to several orders and brotherhoods, and leaving his archive of drawings, library, and collection of geometrical instruments to the Capuchin monastery in Warsaw. A month later, he joined the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary and the Holy Name and died not long afterwards. He is most likely interred at the so-called Moscow Chapel of the church of Dominican Observants at Krakowskie Przedmieście Street.

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Though Tielman earned his place in the history of art as an outstanding architect, one should not forget that his first vocation was painting, a much respected trade in the Netherlands. However, it was not accorded the same respect in seventeenth-century Commonwealth as the professions of architect and military engineer—particularly valued in a country embroiled in an almost everlasting war with its neighbours. This might have been one reason why it has been so hard for us to identify any surviving paintings by the artist within the territories of the Commonwealth. An album of drawings found at Camerino in Italy, which consists of works by artists from Venice, Rome, and the Marche region, among others, includes two sketches by Tielman, one of which is inscribed with ‘Sig: Titelmano Vancameren fiamingo … e Pictore in Polonia del Sig. Principe Giorgio Lubomirski 1661’.

Though the still quite youthful artist was already in Poland at the time, a member of the court of the aforementioned Prince Lubomirski, the drawings indicate that he maintained constant relations with the artistic milieu of his years of study and work in Italy. Most likely, he spent that period in Venice, as indicated by the appearance of Tielman’s name in a poem by Marco Boschini, a Venetian painter, engraver, as well as art merchant and connoisseur, who wrote the piece as a panorama of Venetian painting, including the best living Venetian painters of the period. Tielman is named a virtuoso—a formidable author of nudes and battle scenes, crafted with great sensibility in colouring and composition. One cannot rule out the possibility that, in spite of his young age, the Dutchman would lecture at the Venitian academy; it would seem so given the contents of the diploma of the Cavalier of the Golden Spur that Tielman received from Jan Sobieski in 1676. Tielman’s Italian period, crowned in artistic glory, was doubtless of great importance to the artist himself, a fact stressed in his boastful epigram on one of his lost projects: ‘This is a work of the Sarmatian Tielman of Gameren, born and bred in Holland, who saw Italy in his youth’.

Thus, Tielman earned his position at the court of the Lubomirskis not only through his abilities as an architect and military engineer, but also because of his talents as a painter. Stanisław Mossakowski—Tielman’s monographer—suggests that this painter-architect may have himself produced some of the painted decorations for the interiors of buildings he designed for Lubomirski. However, he also points out that, due to Tielman’s employment in an enormous number of projects and the resulting journeys throughout the country, the architect scarcely found time to execute larger canvasses. Today, we know of two (since lost) paintings from the main altar of the church at Łańcut, depicting the piercing of Christ’s side and Bishop Saint Stanislaus. Four quill sketches on mythological subjects, once held at the library of the Society of Friends of Learning in Poznań, have also been lost. One can glean the compositional abilities of the architect from sixteen emblematic etchings by Johann Georg Helwig based on Tielman’s drawings, which were used as illustrations in Adverbia moralia by Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski. The Dutchman’s real talent for drawing—and, in part, painting—is captured in his designs, drawn in lead and coloured with a brush and ink, which he used to describe to the patron his designs for sculpted decorations of buildings or church furnishings, gravestones, etc. Among the most enthralling of these masterful expositions of the artist’s talent for drawing, his control of the brush, and expressiveness, are designs for a gravestone of Grand Hetman of the Crown Paweł Sapieha for the church at Byaroza (ca. 1680) or, for instance, his study for the main altar at the church of the Bernardines at Czerniaków. The architect’s facility with designs for decorative panneaux is captured in the surviving sketches for decorations of the gallery in the Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw. Mossakowski compellingly suggests that Tielman may have engaged in preparing stage designs for the theatre at the court of his patron, a stipulation apparently corroborated by surviving sketches for the staging of Achille in Sciro and Semiramide.

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In his work as an architect, Tielman employed a normalised method of architectural presentation, subscribing to the rules defined in the second quarter of the seventeenth century in the milieu of architects from northern Netherlands, such as Salomon de Bray (1597–1664) and Pieter Post (1608–69). The method, derived in part from architectural treatises by Andrea Palladio (1508–80) and Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616), consisted in replicating the building by way of drawings of ground plans and the side and frontal façades, produced on one or more pieces of paper in identical scale, typically included in the design. In accordance with the instructions of Giovanni Battista Alberti (1405–72), Italian artist and theoretician of architecture, perspective was eschewed due to its ability to falsify the actual dimensions and proportions of the buildings. Tielman most likely learned the basics of this system of designing at the Duytsche Mathematique, and acquired a tendency to combine a half-sectional view with a half of the façade during his studies in Italy, where this architectural manner was prevalent.

Tielman began working on a design by making a preliminary sketch, a record of the birth of a concept, drawn in lead. Next, on a different sheet, but still in lead, he would superimpose the contours of the object on a pre-established coordinate system, first by marking out the architectonic context, and then by adding the details and sculpted decorative elements. He would sometimes transform the aforementioned coordinate system into a regular square grid, laying a kind of groundwork for the future composition, in a manner typical of the likes of Pieter Post. The architect corrected the drawn lines with brush and ink, starting from the contours of the building and divisions, and then turning toward the details. In case of repetitive elements of decoration, Tielman resorted to filling in only one or two axes, leaving the rest in a contour sketch in quill or lead. This hierarchical mode of composition of the designs may have facilitated communication with the customer, who could thus familiarise himself with the most important devices in the design and discuss or accept them. In the final stage of drawing, Tielman eagerly used the brush and coloured the design with ink and watercolours. Some of these designs thus became akin to representative drawings—rigorously perfected works of high artistic value which would convince the customer or patron to accept the design.

Translation: Antoni Górny

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