«Связанные цари» – во имя польской конституции или Российской империи?

Диалог со временем. 2024. № 89. С. 319–333.

Iserov A. A.

In the Name of the Polish Constitution or the Russian Empire? The article deals with a story first mentioned in historiography by Moisei Alperovich. On February 13 (2), 1787, the Polish Count Ignacy Potocki (1750–1809) at a dinner party in Kiev told a former colonel of the Spanish army, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816) that the best monument of Rome seemed to him the image of kings with their hands bound (Reyes ligados pr. las manos). This phrase reached Grigory Potemkin, King Stanislaus Augustus and his entourage and received a republican interpretation which fits well with the life story of the interlocutors: Ignacy Potocki would become a co-author of the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, in 1792 would serve as an acting War Minister, and during the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Uprising of 1794 would become the Minister of Foreign Affairs; from 1783 Francisco de Miranda was preparing a revolution in Spanish America, and in 1812 he would lead independent Venezuela. The article for the first time attributes the “kings bound” as statues of defeated barbarian rulers (from 1720 in the Palazzo dei Conservatori). From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries these “kings bound” were exhibited on both sides of the female statue of Ceres remade as an image of victorious, triumphant Rome (Roma victrix, Roma triumphans) symbolizing the victory of the Eternal City. My hypothesis is that Ignacy Potocki implied a “double” meaning: both a political declaration of the radical Enlightenment and a hidden panegyric to Catherine II.

Keywords: Екатерина II, Catherine II, Francisco de Miranda, Франсиско де Миранда, Киев, разделы Польши, Polish-Russian relations, partitions of Poland, history of Kiev, Ignacy Potocki, archaeology of Rome, Federico Cesi, Roman sculpture, история Киева, Игнаций Потоцкий, археология Рима, Федерико Чези, польско-русские отношения, античная скульптура, римская скульптура