The article is an attempt to guide a reader from the guidelines included in the standards/requirements of the examination for the upper secondary school, relating to work with different types of information sources, through the three interpretative spaces of a pictures, with which a pupil is being acquainted during the three educational stages, to – finally – specific iconographical sources, representing the mythical, stereotyped and phantasmatic evocation of the past. The title versions of the past reality: template (myth and stereotype) and other (phantasm), found in the selected works of Witold Pruszkowski, are not alternative to each other. They are rather the pictorial narratives running parallel, although requiring a slightly different approach and equipment from the interpreter.