Review: King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533), by Stanisław Mossakowski

Abstract

Stanislaw Mossakowski King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533) Cracow: IRSA, 2012, 376 pp., 277 b/w and 89 color illus. €120, ISBN 978838983114 The importance of Cracow as a center of Renaissance humanism during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has long been recognized by Anglophone historians and linguists interested in the early modern achievements of scholars at the Jagiellonian University and their contacts with Italian counterparts. Among the more familiar figures are the humanist Filippo Buonaccorsi, called Callimachus (1437–1496), who served as tutor to the sons of King Casimir IV Jagiellon (r. 1447–92), and Nicolaus Copernicus, who studied ancient Greek, mathematics, and astronomy at the Jagiellonian. In spite of Cracow’s renown as a humanist center, there is a paucity of English-language scholarship dedicated to the architecture of Poland-Lithuania, which at its greatest extent, in the early seventeenth century, was the largest state in Europe. This lacuna is in part due to factors such as the linguistic inaccessibility of secondary scholarship written in Polish, as well as geopolitical circumstances between 1939 and 1989. Thus Stanislaw Mossakowski’s erudite monograph King Sigismund Chapel at Cracow Cathedral (1515–1533) , first issued in Polish in 2007, is a significant scholarly achievement. Mossakowski, the well-known and prolific former director of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, presents here the mausoleum that most clearly embodies some of the earliest Italian Renaissance visual forms to appear in the European borderlands of Poland-Lithuania. The study underlines the relevance of the Sigismund chapel to classically inspired architecture, and by extension to the rich traditions that inform East-Central European architectural history. In nine highly detailed chapters examining the monument’s site, patronage, ideology, and iconography, Mossakowski asserts the uniqueness of the commission and its significance to the broader history of early modern European, and particularly Italian, art and architecture. The centrally planned, elliptically domed monument, located on the south side of the Wawel cathedral nave, decorated and vaulted …