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 GOTHIC STYLE IN CRACOW ART

FTER the destruction of Cracow in the thirteenth century both princes and subjects had set themselves to work in order to rebuild the old metropolis. We have already spoken of the new foundation, and of the plans for the enormous market-place and the new streets. The architectural activity of the Gothic period coincides with an epoch of material progress. Two Orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, were particularly busy in satisfying the religious needs of the population by active church-building. The Franciscans seem to have been the first who introduced the Gothic movement into Polish art. Boleslaus the Modest called this brotherhood from Prague to Cracow, and installed them in two brick buildings, a church—originally devoted to the Holy Trinity—and a convent. Of the original structure of this church as erected in the years 1237-1269, there is nothing preserved but the cross-shaped ground plan and the gable of the northern transept, distinguishable by its round-arched moulding. The space below this gable is now taken up by a bow window with a pointed arch and modern tracery. The choir, with a plain octagonal chevet, was lengthened and otherwise transformed in the fifteenth century; in 1580 it was burnt down and, on rebuilding, provided with a new vault, which, however, immediately under the curvatures of its arches, still shows the old tracery of the blind double windows of the early Gothic period. The three round mullions, crowned with bell-shaped capitals, form, above, two arcades with pointed arches and trefoil tracery; over these there runs a cinquefoil ornament consisting of semicircles, and above this the empty spaces within the pointed arches of the bow windows are filled up by trefoil ornaments of a similar kind. The cloisters date in part from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and still bear some traces of the original polychrome paint.

A thorough extension, however, of Gothic art over Poland did not begin till the fourteenth century; the first impulse for this movement probably came from the Royal Court on the Wawel: in the reign of King Ladislaus Lokietek the cathedral church