These events exerted an enormous influence on the interest in and study of ‘antiquities’, which was reflected in the art of those times, both in painting and in the architecture of residences or landscape gardens. They were important not only for the formation of tastes and aesthetic preferences but also for the development of national consciousness and the identification of society with its own history. In such an intellectual atmosphere there was a place for painting, which aimed to cultivate knowledge of past epochs.
Since the times of Matejko, we can already speak of the painter-intellectual archetype who, like a researcher, tries to reconstruct the realities of the past. It is precisely this attention to detail that contrasts strongly with the earlier use of general ‘antique’ props. Matejko thoroughly researched old iconography and literature, and then, on their basis, reconstructed the clothes of earlier eras. His ‘archaeological’ approach to the past is also evidenced by his ‘treasury’, in which he collected various kinds of antiques and old props, later used when painting his pictures.
In Sermon of Piotr Skarga, two views of the past intersect. One is objective, and involves measuring historical events according to contemporary criteria and ideals. In his work, the painter attempted to provide answers to the burning questions of the present and looked at history from this perspective, making selections and shifts in it. The second approach, on the other hand, is characterised by the desire to penetrate past epochs, to look at them through their own eyes. Whilst the first approach inclined to generalising, synthesising idealisation, the second resulted in pedantry in tracking down historical realities and details.
This required the painter to make a difficult compromise between the universal character and message of the work and the particularity of a specific event and its realities. There was a conflict between the prevailing conventions and historical knowledge, and with time more and more importance was attributed to the latter. In the case of Matejko’s painting, an ideal balance between generalising vision and historical detail is maintained.
Sermon of Piotr Skarga is the first example in his body of work of a historiosophical approach, which he later consistently developed. In this type of painting, the artist’s success was ensured by the viewer's ability to recognise a historical scene. Clear references to literature or national history ensured that the clues contained in the painting coincided with the viewer’s expectations and horizon of knowledge. In this way, the content could be made more concrete, because the place of history was not the image, containing only certain signs or directives, but the consciousness of the viewer. This phenomenon was described by Maria Poprzęcka as a literary style of reception of images, which was connected with a set of expectations of the viewer, defined in the 19th century by literary culture and the common custom of reading. The intertextual reading of Matejko’s paintings, however, does not have to mean references exclusively to literary sources. Stanisław Czekalski thoroughly analysed Sermon of Piotr Skarga (and its sketches), which led him to a composition analogous to Matejko’s work – Hendrik Leys’s Restoration of the Catholic Cult in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Antwerp in 1566 – and to read possible references to the Counter-Reformation in the painting.