The Question of the Presented Time in the Works of Wit Stwosz with Particular Regard to the Altar from Our Lady's Church in Cracow. The Application of Temporal Criterium in Search of Stylistic Analogies in the Art of the 2nd Half of the 15th Century

Abstract

The question of the presented time is more and more often treated as a separate research problem in the studies on art. The temporality of plastic works may also be a criterium for the considerations on the style of a given period or concrete artists.

This is confirmed by the example of Our Lady's church altar in Cracow. The temporal analysis of the structure of the greatest work of Wit Stwosz has become the reason to resume dialogue on the stylistic genesis of the sculptor's artistic work and its kindship with the broader circle of 15th-century art.

The internal time of the altar has a multilayer structure; its complex construction cor­responds to the rich variety of plastic forms and contents. Among the formal means which create the temporality of presentations, the most important are those which serve to show movement, that is: arrangement of figures, their gestures, composition of figural groups and their location in space, manner of forming draperies of garment. Stwosz's figures are naturally vivid, so there is an illusion of an action taking place, whose course is determined by the lapse of time. Occasionally, however, due to their ceremonial character and pathos, the movement of the figures evokes invariable duration.

The whole of reality presented in Our Lady's church altar contains an analogical twofold character. On the one hand Stwosz's realism as to details, meticulously recreating any details and the material structure of things, places the presented events in the changeable and earthly world. On the other hand such factors as: representative character of the scenes, conventional and scenic space, abstract shapes of the drapery, and the like, point to idealistic presuppositions of master Wit's art, and characterize supernatural order, to which the artist's vision is sub­ordinated.

In terms of contents the time presented in Cracow retablo develops along two levels as well. The first is the level of narration about the earthly history of Christ and Mary, subordinated to the laws of historical time; the second being the dogmatic contents which reveal the nature of sacred time. In Stwosz's work the two temporal levels converge in the time contemporary to the sculptor, a time introduced by the Gothic forms of the props and architecture.

The temporal construction of Stwosz's polyptych from Our Lady's church has its counterpart in Rogier van der Weyden's artistic work. The Netherlandian painter resembles closely Stwosz in the way he combines realism and idealism, action and representation, narration and symbolic contents. Nicholas from Leyden output as well as South German art from the 15th century, which remaind under the latter's influence, were undoubtedly the source of Stwosz's sculptures, yet they show fewer analogies in this respect.

The followers of Wit Stwosz's art did not take over his complex and ordained temporal conception, as it was presented in the altar from Our Lady's church in Cracow. They were, above all, inspired by the original formal solutions, as well as decorative effects of folded garments. They adjusted these elements to their own vision of the world in which sacrum and profanum never reached such unity and balance as then did in Stwosz's work.