Prace Konstantego Wojciechowskiego przy katedrze we Włocławku a koncepcja „stylu wiślano‑bałtyckiego”

Abstract

The Włocławek Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of the most important Gothic churches in the lowlands of northern Poland. However, overshadowed by the Cathedrals in Poznań and Gniezno, it is considered a building that is more modest in scale and less artistically valuable. An important issue related to the history of the church is its restoration that was carried out in the last two decades o the 19th century, initially according to the plans of Tadeusz Stryjeński from Cracow and then led by the Warsaw architect Konstanty Wojciechowski (1841–1910). Wojciechowski re-Gothycized the building, giving it a ‘cathedral’ form featuring a magnificent façade with two high towers. These works coincided with the growing popularity of the idea of the ‘Vistula-Baltic Gothic’ as the Polish national style in church construction. The Warsaw architect used the forms of the cathedral he rebuilt to develop his own vision of the church in the ‘Vistula-Baltic style’, competitive to the solutions used by Józef Dziekoński. The incarnation of this vision was the church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Łódź, followed by a series of smaller buildings erected in villages and in small towns within the Russian partition, in which the architect repeated his pattern on a smaller or larger scale. The culmination of Wojciechowski’s creative path was the Church of the Holy Family in Częstochowa (the current Cathedral), built from 1901.