On the Location and Shaping of the Jesuit Monastery in Jarosław in the Second Half of the 16th Century and the First Half of the 17th Century in the Light of the Transformations of the Space Structure of the City and the Owners’ Patronage

Abstract

Since archival sources concerning historic cities in Poland, their history and transformations, are highly incomplete and scattered, the preserved collection of Jesuit documents in Rome, including extensive correspondence connected with the activity of the order in Poland, is a precious historical source for studies of the city in the modern age. Besides the rare urban experiments of fully Renaissance character in the second half of the 16th century the leading research motif for that period is modernization of the look of the Polish cities; the Jesuit order was an important participant in the process. Jesuits looked for possibilities of settlement in big king’s cities and significant cultural-trade centres. Having received an offer from Jarosław, the city where the Tarnowskis resided, they tried to persuade Zofia of Sprowa to found a monastery in Lvov or Przemyśl. On the virtue of the document of 29 December 1571 the area of the so-called ‘grodzisko’ (remnants of an old town) in Jarosław was officially given to the Jesuits. Two more years had to pass before the order made the decision to settle the first Jesuits there and a few more before it started building the monastery in that town.

Could Jarosław compete with Przemyśl and Lvov? Was the area offered for building the monastery attractive for settling the monks in? Why was the foundation accepted and the location chosen? – these are the questions that are essential for an analysis of the process of building and developing Jesuit foundations in Polish towns, not only in Jarosław. In the second half of the 16th century when the Jesuits were watching the town, Jarosław clearly experienced a period of economic boom. International fairs established by the owners ensured intensive development of the town and the traders were quickly becoming rich. They invited intensive traffic into the town, which gave it an exceptional position in the region. The trade town with a river port, well managed by its Catholic owners, could be attractive.

The area offered to the Jesuits was the site of a town that existed before location of Jarosław and the owners even earlier had meant to start some activity there. The Jesuits’ preserved letters describe it in the following way: „...it is beautifully situated and vast, so it will be enough not only for the church and the college, but for the garden as well. On three sides it has a steep bank ‘like a castle’, from which there is a beautiful view of the wide valley of the River San”, and the offered place „...belongs to the most beautifully situated ones in the province because of the view of valleys, woods and hills spreading from here”. The assessments of the place selection in the quoted Jesuit letters that qualify it due to the landscape, belong to the earliest ones in the Polish city-planning that are confirmed by the written sources. They allow one to look at Jesuit monasteries as conscious space creations and consider designing particular buildings according to the requirements of the landscape.

When in 1573 the founders offered the order a new place on a neighbouring hill it was accepted too: it had the same landscape advantages and it gave much more freedom in shaping the group of buildings as it was almost twice as big. Removing it from the wooden town gave better conditions of fire safety, and since it was situated near the area showing the greatest development dynamics there was hope that the order could have a bigger influence on the final spatial form of the new town quarter being built in the vicinity.

Hence it was with this quarter and with the centre of the town – the Market Square that the architect Józef Briccio compositionally joined the buildings of the monastery that he was designing: the Jesuit church and the vast edifice of the college. The buildings were oriented, as at the first stage of Jesuit presence in Poland they considered the rule of orienting churches as a significant one that was to be observed. The construction of the group of buildings was begun with the college edifice in March 1580 and it was partly finished and came into use as soon as August 1583. The construction of the church was longer, due to the death of the founders: in July 1580 Zofia and in May next year Jan Kostka died and there was a long pause in building before in 1586 the foundation was taken over by their son – also Jan.

The space composition was significantly enriched after the fire of the town in 1600. This was introduced by Giacomo Briano of Modena who was engaged for work in the Polish Jesuit province in 1616. In Jarosław his role was to rebuild the church. In order to strengthen it the architect introduced two domed chapels supporting the nave and the vestibule. Briano’s design also included a tall, massive spire embedded into the outer wall of the vestibule, which was never built. The architect used elements requiring a precise connection with the town space; he ‘turned’ the monastery towards the city and integrated it with the new quarter and made a clear connection with the Market Square.

The south side wall of the church made longer by the vestibule and decorated with the domed chapel now became the church’s main elevation and the square’s frontage on the town side. It received a monumental entrance in the form of a triumphal arch. The square in front of the Jesuit complex is Briano’s work. The school building (beginning of the 17th century) divided the widely open space and separated two interiors in it: the ‘square-audience hall’ – the inner main square directly connected with the Jesuit complex; and the ‘town square’, much smaller, which was the vestibule of the audience hall and a trading annex to the Market Square. The squares were decorated with the clock tower of the college that also closed the axis of Kolegialna Street, joining the complex to the Market Square.

Briano’s design of ‘re-orienting’ the Jesuit complex and establishing a modern city square in front of it was undoubtedly connected with the ambitious plans by Anna Ostrogska, the owner of the town. Her town-planning aspirations and abilities are proven by establishing ‘a new town’ on the area of ‘grodzisko’ – the former town. The new town had the Mały Rynek – the Small Market Place (about 1603) – just beside her husband’s Renaissance residence. Using the opportunity given by the need to re-build the town after the 1625 fire she undertook introducing safety precautions against fire. She employed a surveyor to make the measurements of the town. She also put in force order regulations that required that the inhabitants kept to the plan and rules of constructing new buildings.

In her programme of city-planning activities also new church buildings were included that were connected with the suburbs and were supposed to stimulate the spatial development of the town: the fortified Benedictine nuns complex (1615) in the Sandomierskie suburb and another foundation for the Jesuits behind the Krakowskie suburb, by the votive Virgin Mary Church ‘in the fields’ (1629), generously salaried by her daughter, Anna Alojza Chodkiewiczowa, from 1636 the new owner of Jarosław, who continued her mother’s work equally ambitiously.

Both Jesuit complexes: ‘in town’ and ‘in the fields’ made up two poles of the baroque macro-spacial composition. They determined the ceremonial space of the 17th century Jarosław, stressed by the solemn ‘forum’ with a column and a holy sculpture in front of the Krakowska Gate. It was used as the site of great religious ceremonies that from the middle of the 17th century dominated over the life of Jarosław.