Footnotes

• Pyi Velonsky (also known as Pavel Velonsky) is one of the most well known Polish sculptors of the late 19h – early 20th century. Schooled in the academic tradition at the art school in Warsaw and at the Academy of Art in St. Petersburg , he quickly gained recognition and achieved sucsess. After his graduation from the Academy, he was awarded a travelling stipend to study abroad and visited Vienna and Rome and also spent time in France and Germany. It was during his extended European travels and while working in the company and under tutalage of leading Russian and European artists an sculptors that Velonsky mastered the compositional clarity and achieved a level of technical perfection which developed the picturesque narrative for many of his future masterpieces.
  He received a title of Academitian for the model 'Gladiator at the arena' executed in terracotta in 1881. The model later was cast in bronze and became widely popular. It subsequently received a gold medal at the art exhibition in Berlin.
  The bronze depicts a heroic gladiator armed with trident and a fighter's net and raising his right arm in a greeting gesture aimed at the Emperor present at the spectacle of the fight in colisseum. The fighter's role was to symbolise a brave fisherman who was facing dangerous sea monsters.
  An identical variant of the bronze is known to exist at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow and a larger version executed in marble is kept in the National Museum in Warsaw.
  In his many works, from small scale to monumental examples, Velonsky demonstrated wonderful imagination, presenting a poeticised image of the antiquity whilst achieving a remarkable life-like quality of his characters.