From the former Gallery of Decorative Arts and the National Museum's Gallery of Old European and Old Polish Painting, a new Gallery of Old Art has been created. By combining technical genres, we want to move away from the traditional discourse of art history, which separated 'high' pictorial art - painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking - from artistic craftsmanship, regarding it as an applied field. Meanwhile, in earlier eras, no such division existed. In principle, all these arts were treated equally. If any of them were elevated, it was not painting or sculpture, but goldsmithery and the production of tapestries. The term "art" itself - Latin ars (followed by Italian, French and English versions: arte, l'art, the art), Greek téchne, German and Dutch Kunst - originally meant craftsmanship, skilful workmanship, craftsmanship. It was the artisanal, virtuoso quality of workmanship that was valued most highly in painting and sculpture.

Nor does the pictorial nature of painting and sculpture - subject to the principle of imitation of reality (mimesis) - make these genres separate. As our exhibition shows, the vast majority of works of old craftsmanship were indeed decorative in nature, but contained figurative representations, which are, after all, the essence of painting and sculpture.

Arts and crafts shared common purposes and functions with painting and sculpture, as well as the spaces in which they were collected and exhibited. And this is the division of galleries - into 'social spaces': 1) palace, villa, mansion; 2) church, chapel and domestic altar; 3) city. In other words: 1) court culture, 2) religious culture, 3) urban culture.