RenEU - Kraków - Mogila. Sanctuary of The Holy Cross of The Cistercian Abbey

Kraków - Mogila. Sanctuary of The Holy Cross of The Cistercian Abbey

Kraków - Mogila. Sanctuary of The Holy Cross and the Cistercian Abbey

Kraków - Mogila. Sanctuary of The Holy Cross and the Cistercian Abbey, polychromes by Stanisław Samostrzelnik

Kraków - Mogila. Sanctuary of The Holy Cross and the Cistercian Abbey, interior

The church was built in Mogiła near Kraków (today within the administrative limits of the city). According to the rules of the Cistercian Order, it was designed in the plan of a Latin cross, and built of brick and stone in Romanesque-Gothic style. Originally, the walls of the church were crude and were not covered in plaster. In the days of Abbott Erazm Ciołek (Suffragan Bishop of Kraków), the church interior received its plaster, and Friar Stanisław Samostrzelnik (a local Cistercian monk) decorated its walls. He painted the scene of the Annunciation in the chancel, and the Crucifixion in the southern arm of the transept, decorating also the church, the gallery, and library with his works. His 16th-century fresco decorations today belong to the extremely precious heritage of Renaissance art. The murals from 1538-1541 date back to the last stage of the painter's activity, and they clearly feature the transformation of the ornamental motifs that he developed. They are especially clearly visible in the eastern galleries where characteristic vegetal motifs, notably acanthus leaves and vines, are present. Samostrzelnik's paintings were renovated in 2008.

Stanislaw Samostrzelnik

Stanisław Samostrzelnik was most probably born around 1480, and died in 1541. He hailed from a Kraków bourgeois family. His family name is semantically connected to the makers of bows and crossbows. He entered the Cistercian monastery in Mogiła.

Samostrzelnik had already become active as a painter in 1506. He practised easel, book miniature, and wall painting, and worked for the royal court from the mid-1520s. At the time, he illuminated the Prayer Book of King Sigismund I (1524, today in the British Museum) and The Prayer Book of Queen Bona (1527-28), and diplomas for the royal chancery.

Those who commissioned him also included Bishop Piotr Tomicki, and it is highly probable that the portrait of the cleric in pontifical robes hanging in the gallery of the Franciscan monastery in Kraków is another work of the talented Cistercian. In 1525, he was given a quite extraordinary commission: together with Jan the painter, he decorated a banner of white damask, which Albrecht Hohenzollern laid as a token of subservience before Sigismund I during the ceremony of Prussian Homage in the Main Market Square of Kraków on 10 April.

Stanisław Samostrzelnik was the first outstanding Renaissance painter in Poland. His art derives from the late Gothic tradition of Kraków, yet with time, it was enriched with Renaissance elements inspired by other works and milieux (the painter never visited Italy). His style is elegant, refined, and can certainly be referred to as courtly. He worked in the days when the most magnificent and impressive structures and sculptures were the work of Italian architects and sculptors, yet no Italian painters could be found in contemporary Poland. Owing to his eminent talent, Samostrzelnik received commissions from monarchs and bishops, magnates and the wealthiest monastic orders. However, as he undertook too many tasks, he was forced to resort to assistance. He worked on the wall paintings in Mogiła and Miechów (the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre) falling back on his workshop, of which he became the artistic manager.