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

The Stages of the Construction of St Mary’s Basilica. ReconstructionModels for the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków More than fifty years ago Józef Lepiarczyk published hisin-depth paper titled “Fazy budowy kościoła Mariackiegow Krakowie (wieki XIII –XV)” [Th e stages of building StMary’s Basilica in Kraków (from the 13th to the 15th centuries)]in Rocznik Krakowski [Kraków annual]. Erudite inthe abundance of the reference materials, persuasive in theiranalysis, and evocative in the proposed reconstructions, Lepiarczyk’sarticle has permanently shaped our idea of thehistory of the church. Sketched in a B pencil, the outlinesof the building in its three basic stages of development, i.e.in the years 1320, 1360–1395, and 1408, became its widelyknown and recognized images.The dating given by Lepiarczyk was corrected and complementedin the later years. However, a new thoroughstudy of the history of the church in the Middle Ages hasnot been proposed, and the suggested corrections were infact of a fragmentary and contributory nature. New informationhas been provided by the material sources gatheredduring the architectural as well as the architectural andexcavation surveys carried out during the past fi fty years.Moreover, numerous comparative studies of the architecturaldetails have been published.When a new exhibition devoted to Kraków during theMiddle Ages was planned, the Historical Museum of theCity of Kraków commissioned the author of this paper todevelop the reconstruction models of St Mary’s Basilicain the successive stages of its construction. The first andthe most important stage was to produce a detailed threedimensionalvisualization. The historical and comparativestudies were decisive for visualizing the stages that havenot survived to this day, i.e. the Romanesque and the EarlyGothic ones. The completeness of the presentation of thearchitecture of the church with the historically likely architecturaldetails has been accepted unquestioningly. Theauthor of the three-dimensional visualization and a coauthorof a number of detailed solutions in reconstructingthe architectural details was architect and IT specialist PiotrOpaliński. The chronological stages adopted in the visualizationbasically coincided with those proposed by Józef Lepiarczyk(1320, 1360, 1450). However, thanks to the morerecent studies mentioned above, some sections have beenpresented diff erently in the reconstructions. First of all, thearchitectural details have been reproduced in a highly accurateway, taking into account their probable colouring.