This article is divided into two parts. Part I presents the origins and the research objectives of the authorial project Don Kichot Open Gallery/Don Quijote – galeria abierta. Its first product is a book titled identically to the project and published in collaboration with the POSET Foundation. It contains Miguel de Unamuno’s essay ‘El caballero de la triste figura’ (1896), translated into Polish by Carlos Marrodán Casas, and quality repro-ductions of nearly fifty artworks on the theme of Don Quixote (some of them shown for the first time) produced over a period of over 250 years. The album features the work of thirty Polish artists. Part II presents an interpretation of Marian Nowiński's painting ‘Don K[ichot] trwa dalej. W cieniu 2’ (Don K[Quixote] is still going on: In the shadow 2). A closer examination of this picture reveals a wealth of creative references to the Euro-pean and Polish tradition (Andrea Mantegna, Annibale Carracci, Orazio Borgianni and Jacek Malczewski respectively) and an artistic affinity for the cinema of Grigori Kozints-cev, Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam. The fusion of two aesthetics (painting and film) and diverse styles of painting (Renaissance, Baroque, twentieth-century symbolism) is testi-mony to both Nowiński's erudition and the boldness of his artistic ambition.

This article traces two lines of philosophical interpretations of the character of Don Quixote. Common to both is the view that Don Quixote should be treated as a paragon of directness, i.e. a subject that strives to attain his ideals – a sphere of sense that is general – without any mediation (in the sense of Vermittlung). For the existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who in this respect follows Kierkegaard, the individual cannot constitute himself unless he rejects mediation, Quixote is a knight of faith, whose every intervention is an act of heroism analogous to Abraham's leap of faith. For the Hegelian Constantin Noica the opposite is true: any attempt to move from the particular to the general without mediation is a symptom of an existential and ontological disorder. Taking his cue from Hegel’s Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit ( Phenomenology of Spirit), Noica repudiates Quixote’s unswerving commitment as insane folly. These two diametrically opposed assessments – one inspired by Kirkegaard, the other by Hegel – show the significance of Don Quixote as a focus of the modern debate about mediation and its dilemmas.