The article examines the problem of the historicity of Jesus Christ – the incarnate God, in Cyprian Norwid’s Album Orbis, a personal collection of cultural texts of mostly visual nature. The artist uses the material to present his own vision of the history of the world. He thinks about it symbolically, every fact and historical vestige becomes a sign, which allows reading the fate of humanity as a book about the human salvation. Its central figure is Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Ideal and the most perfect man. The artist accumulates the cultural texts that refer to Him the most in the second book. He shows the importance of Christ in history, both directly and indirectly. He presents the views of the Holy Land and Sinai as well as the ancient artefacts such as the Titulus Crucis and the Bezetha Vase. Norwid sees them as evidence of the naturalness, rationality and universality of Christianity, which combines valuable elements of all cultures, especially the Greco-Roman and Jewish one. Norwid also collects portraits of Jesus, mainly in profile, supposedly copied from an emerald gem made for the Emperor Tiberius (in fact, the tradition only goes back to the Renaissance). These images are related to Norwid’s own theory of art and his definition of beauty, as the shape/profile of Love – that of the loving God, Jesus Christ. The Saviour is also a model of humanity, and the best image of the Father, which everyone should imitate. The portraits in profile illustrate the conception of the entire Album Orbis, the profile of the human history, and point to its most important figure.

In his voluminous memoirs compiled in the early 17th century the Dominican Martin Gruneweg describes a pageant named the Parade of the Planets that took place in Warsaw on 15 February 1580. Central to its stage design was the iconography of the seven planets, each of them represented by its Zodiac sign and its affiliated House. However, no less important for the spectacle was the appearance of numerous characters and stage props from the carnival tradition, e.g. richly dressed men from the Orient, Bacchus, a procession of floats. The Parade of the Planets was a festivity which brought together the court and the townsfolk; it was probably organized by both court and town. More generally, it could be described as an urban carnival parade mimicking some features of the Renaissance Trionfo. The knowledge of celestial phenomena presented in this spectacle was probably adjusted to the needs of a wide audience of the ‘middling sort of people’, whose belief in the geocentric model of the cosmos was still intact. It seems that the Parade of the Planets contained hardly any profound insights or hermetic clues. Gruneweg, though, does find it susceptible to an allegorical interpretation which reveals the spectacle's embedding in Christian spirituality and middle-class virtues. He is pleased with the colourful spectacle, but warns of taking too much pleasure in this kind of entertainment.