COUNT MICHAL JAN BORCH AS PATRON AND COLLECTOR: ART BETWEEN ITALY AND THE INFLANTY VOIVODESHIP IN THE AGE OF PARTITION

This article reevaluates the lifelong artistic patronage and collecting practices of Polish-Lithuanian Count Michal Jan Borch (1753-1810/11) against the historical background of Enlightenment Europe more broadly and specifically the Age of Partition (c. 1750-1810). This article examines how despite persistent financial shortcomings and political difficulties, Borch staked for himself a strategic position as patron and collector, staging a renovation of the present by engaging with late baroque, rococo, and neoclassical Italianate forms that inflected Italy and the antique not as fixed entities but as a malleable or notional fragments that could be arbitrated, reassembled and transformed through the intermediating agency of persons and objects, and related to the past in form, style and language, thematizing the temporal passage between venerable and modern in a way that reanimated the grandeur of the past in honor of Borch's re-envisioning of his restored homeland. As a case study in period self-fashioning, the article is structured around four portraits of Borch and his family executed at crucial inflection points in his life and career.