Die mittelalterlichen Glasmalereien in der Stadpfarrkirche Maria Himmelfahrt in Krakau

The first Polish volume in the international Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi series presents medieval stained glass of St Mary's Church in Cracow, a building that counts among the most important city churches in Central Europe. The windows, executed at the close of the reign of Casimir the Great and the beginning of the Jagiellonian rule, form the largest surviving medieval stained-glass scheme in Poland. Only one-sixth of the enormous scheme, originally counting over six hundred panels, survives. The stained-glass panels, which originally filled eleven windows in the chancel, are now gathered in the three apse windows. Research for this volume has enabled to recreate the initial arrangement of the panels; the iconographic programme of the scheme has undergone a contextual analysis, while its formal analysis has revealed stylistic diversity of the glass. The volume is a result of scholarly collaboration between Lech Kalinowski and Helena Małkiewiczówna, who formulated the main theses on the stained glass of St Mary's Church in the 1990s. In 2011-2013 these results were modified, further developed and put in writing by Helena Małkiewiczówna, assisted by Dobrosława Horzela. The volume opens with a general introduction by Marek Walczak, which is aimed at presenting the main subject of the book within the context of the city's broadly understood fourteenth-century material culture.