Museums of Cracow [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Tadeusz Chruscicki, Director National Museum in Cracow This book is devoted to the art collections of Cracow museums and other institutions which are museums in all but name inasmuch as their treasures are also on public display. All share the unique physical setting of a city steeped in historical and artistic atmosphere. As Cracow itself constitutes a museum, it has seemed necessary to cull the material from various collections rather than from a single museum. Much of the material survives outside the walls of museums proper, remaining in the setting to which it originally belonged, a condition that is obvious on the spot but hard to capture on the printed page. This is the case with works of art in architectural monuments such as the Royal Castle and the Cathedral on Wawel Hill, numerous other churches and palaces, famous public buildings, and old burghers' mansions. These works have preserved their aesthetic qualities in the places for which they were originally intended and merge with what has been assigned by history to the safekeeping of museums, gratifying the age-old need to commune in our daily lives with values of a higher order and feel the continuity of human culture and its achievements. Poland's emergence as a state toward the end of the 10th century coincided with the culmination of the Romanesque period whose art styles it proceeded to assimilate. As a result, lasting links were forged with Latin culture, at first mostly through the intermediary of Moravia and then Bohemia to the south. In due course the relations with Rome and the Empire became more direct, and the universal patterns of European cultural experience stemming from its chief sources took root and stamped themselves on the centuries that followed. Art historians use the term "artistic capital" for places which at different times have grown into firmly established centers in the diffusion of universal ideas and currents in art, and as the dominant influence in the culture of areas which have acquired an autonomous identity by a combination of various political, economic, ethnic and other factors. Cracow unquestionably belongs in this category not only because of the role it has played in the cultural history, past and present, of Poland, but also of the place it occupies in the European heritage. For some five hundred years, from the early Middle Ages to the close of the 16th century, Cracow was also the political capital of Poland. Much later it was spared the devastation suffered elsewhere in the last and most brutal of world wars. Today it is enjoying a third "golden age" and belongs among monuments of the world's cultural heritage placed under special care and protection. The first heyday in the city's fortunes stretched from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when it basked in the brilliance shed by the glittering and stimulating life of the royal court on Wawel Hill. As the kingdom of the last rulers of the Piast line and the