CHAPTER II
ARTIST'S PORTRAIT
The artist has for centuries been treated as someone exceptional, endowed with almost supernatural powers. Actually, up to this very day we have called talent a ‘Divine gift’, emanation of genius. Such a perception of the artist resulted from the role attributed to art. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was comparable with religion, metaphysics, serving as a mysterious window for a common mortal to peep into an ‘endless abyss of infinity’ (Zenon Przesmycki-Miriam) and it was expected to satiate our longing for communing with beauty, aspiration to something better. According to Wyspiański, ‘art should give us what the world around cannot, […] where we would enjoy being’.
Let us have a look at portraits of painters, composers, musicians. Perhaps their faces will reveal the desire and capacity to fulfill such a task.
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