Wrocław – National Museum in Wrocław (Pieta from St. Vincent’s Church)

This pietà is in the collections of the National Museum in Wrocław and it was made in the area, likely in around 1420. It’s a depiction of dead Jesus following the crucifixion, designed to have emotional intensity and evidently from the Gothic tradition. It’s a medieval polychrome wooden statue, although the colours have rather faded away over the centuries. I am fascinated by these depictions, not because they’re particularly cheerful, but because I can try and imagine the thousands of people in the medieval period who would have looked at them and maybe inspired by them.

It was originally located in St. James’s Church which was founded in around 1240 as a Romanesque church, although it underwent significant Gothic reconstruction in the 14th and 15th centuries. In 1530, after the displaced Premonstratensians took the church over when the Franciscans were kicked out, it was rededicated to St. Vincent of Saragossa which was their patron saint of the monastery that they’d been thrown out of. The building was badly damaged during the Second World War, including the Hochberg Chapel where this statue had been located. The chapel has now been reconstructed and they’ve placed a copy of this statue in there, with the main Cathedral (as it now is) being the home of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. I’m not sure whether this statue was recovered after the war from the damaged church, or whether it was moved earlier on to protect it, but it’s something of a survivor.

I also rather like that when this statue was originally placed here, the church was in Poland state (the Piast dynasty), although it then came under the control of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then the Habsburg Monarchy, then the Prussian Empire, then the German Empire, then the Weimar Republic, then Nazi Germany and only in 1945 did it return to Poland again.