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Writing an academic history of Polish art was an urgent task of art historians after World War I, when the country regained its political independence. An important and creditable achievement in that respect was a study by Michał Walicki and Juliusz Starzyński, published in 1934 as a kind of supplement to the monumental Geschichte der Kunst von der altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart by the Marburg historian Richard Hamann, translated at that time into Polish. In 1936, the work of the Polish scholars was published again in the form of a separate book. The paper focuses on three problems that were addressed in it: the cultural and artistic ties of Poland to the West, the vernacular features of Polish art, and the presence of the “Eastern art” in Polish artistic heritage. The author examines also the question whether those issues were related to the political, social, and cultural reality of the Second Polish Republic.

A paper delivered at the 26th Deutscher Kunsthistorikertag in Hamburg, Germany, in March 2001. The history of the Kunstgeschichtliche Institut at the Reichsuniversitat Posen in 1941–45 is discussed. The Reichsuniversitat Posen (Poznan, Poland), a product of the Third Reich's expansionist drive, was officially opened on April 27, 1941. The writer addresses the development of the university's institute of art history and considers the aims of its teaching and research programs.

Jan van Eyck's aim in painting the Crucifixion panel of the diptych in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art was to portray the drama of the Passion "exactly as it happened." Indeed, he achieved a startling degree of realism in the spatial and temporal relationships represented, and the setting, the figures, and the interaction between the latter are all treated with meticulous truthfulness. To create this world which imitates empirical reality but also maintains something of an autonomous, nonreferential existence, the artist used a specific type of composition, that of the "populous calvary." This genre, as Hans Belting and Dagmar Eichberger have shown in their groundbreaking work on van Eyck, is marked by features of pictorial narration. The present article points out that these features in The Crucifixion merely constitute a narrative framework for many of the painting's special characteristics, in particular its instantaneous, snapshot-like quality, derived from the open yet fragmentary handling of space. Their origins lie in Italian painting of the first half of the 14th century. An important source of the narrative element may be the little-known Crucifixion panel attributed to Pietro Lorenzetti in the Museo Stibbert, Florence, while the earliest example of the element of eventfulness and immediacy may be Duccio's Entry into Jerusalem from the main altar of the cathedral of Siena.

This article brings up the question of the relationship between pictorial and literary traditions from the example of the cycle on the altar in Wroclaw (1447) depicting St. Barbara's life on earth as well as her going to heaven. How the pictorial legend existed on its own, as well as how the literary impulse influenced the tradition of the visual language of the picture - this is the general framework the detailed analysis works within. The legend found on the altar in Wroclaw mainly comes from one no longer alive today and originating at the turn of the 14th to the 15th centuries from the Franco-Flemish legend of St. Barbara, which also influenced the form of the altars of Master Francke and of Gonzalo Perez. The creator of the altar in Wroclaw who came to Silesia from the Upper Rheinland in this cycle made fragmentary modification at different levels of pictorial representations and these were dictated by reading the legends from the literature, among others the legends in manuscripts which, at the start of the 15th century, were in the Dominican Cloister in Wroclaw.

The figure of Christ was treated from the perspective of the Medieval Christian concept of the purified body of the Resurrected. Christ embodies most clearly what theologians called the dos agilitatis. This comes out in the bold straightforward movements in the figure of Christ. Veit Stoss achieved this effect through a unique, ingenious combination of pictorial elements from earleir representations of this theme. As model must have served the no longer extant Resurrection ascribed to Hans Pleydenwurff, as well as one by Caspar Isenmann. An analysis of the Veit Stoss Resurrection in the context of the whole program of the opened retable shows the many layers of reciprocal relations of ideas between the particular parts of the altar.

L'ouvrage, trilingue, contient des interventions en allemand, polonais et anglais.; International audience