ABSTRACT
The long nineteenth century saw a wholesale recalibration of Jagiellonian memory in Polish culture, in the highly charged context of the Partitions. In 1795, Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary conducted their third and final Partition, or annexation, of Poland-Lithuania. The Polish monarchy ceased to exist as both territory and institution. The genealogical imperative in Vasa-led memory of the Jagiellonians can also be seen in a series of striking seventeenth-century examples. In the 1640s, Sigismund III's son King Ladislaus IV commissioned the so-called Marble Room in the castle in Warsaw, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's new capital. Designed by the Italian architect Giovanni Battista Gisleni, this was to be the most splendid reception room in the complex. Golden Age rhetoric first emerged in the immediate aftermath of Sigismund Augustus's death, as an early modern retrospective judgement on this ruling house. In 1585, a poem composed for the wedding of Princess Anna Jagiellon praised the royal line which had 'given Poland golden centuries'.
