Fazy budowy kościoła Mariackiego. Modele rekonstrukcyjne dla Muzeum Historycznego Miasta Krakowa

Abstract

The Stages of the Construction of St Mary’s Basilica. Reconstruction
Models for the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków

More than fifty years ago Józef Lepiarczyk published his
in-depth paper titled “Fazy budowy kościoła Mariackiego
w Krakowie (wieki XIII –XV)” [Th e stages of building St
Mary’s Basilica in Kraków (from the 13th to the 15th centuries)]
in Rocznik Krakowski [Kraków annual]. Erudite in
the abundance of the reference materials, persuasive in their
analysis, and evocative in the proposed reconstructions, Lepiarczyk’s
article has permanently shaped our idea of the
history of the church. Sketched in a B pencil, the outlines
of the building in its three basic stages of development, i.e.
in the years 1320, 1360–1395, and 1408, became its widely
known and recognized images.
The dating given by Lepiarczyk was corrected and complemented
in the later years. However, a new thorough
study of the history of the church in the Middle Ages has
not been proposed, and the suggested corrections were in
fact of a fragmentary and contributory nature. New information
has been provided by the material sources gathered
during the architectural as well as the architectural and
excavation surveys carried out during the past fi fty years.
Moreover, numerous comparative studies of the architectural
details have been published.
When a new exhibition devoted to Kraków during the
Middle Ages was planned, the Historical Museum of the
City of Kraków commissioned the author of this paper to
develop the reconstruction models of St Mary’s Basilica
in the successive stages of its construction. The first and
the most important stage was to produce a detailed threedimensional
visualization. The historical and comparative
studies were decisive for visualizing the stages that have
not survived to this day, i.e. the Romanesque and the Early
Gothic ones. The completeness of the presentation of the
architecture of the church with the historically likely architectural
details has been accepted unquestioningly. The
author of the three-dimensional visualization and a coauthor
of a number of detailed solutions in reconstructing
the architectural details was architect and IT specialist Piotr
Opaliński. The chronological stages adopted in the visualization
basically coincided with those proposed by Józef Lepiarczyk
(1320, 1360, 1450). However, thanks to the more
recent studies mentioned above, some sections have been
presented diff erently in the reconstructions. First of all, the
architectural details have been reproduced in a highly accurate
way, taking into account their probable colouring.