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GOTHIC STYLE IN CRACOW ART
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exercised on painting by the carvings is manifestly shown by a picture of the Holy Family in the National Museum. Cracow painters of the fifteenth century enjoyed a very wide reputation; they were often called to other Polish cities when painters' work was wanted. Thus, in 1476, the city of Lemberg summoned a painter of Cracow, Nicholas Haberschack, brother-in-law to Stanislas Stoss, to paint a carved altar-piece. He probably stood in a close relation to the workshop of Stoss.

The restoration of several convent churches, during recent years, brought to light a number of valuable medieval wall paintings, which had been thickly covered by whitewash for centuries. They have been renewed and made permanent, and in this state bear witness of the artistic movement of the period, which had made its way from the West through Bohemia to Cracow. Such pictures, as the Mystic Press (illustration 48), in the cloisters of the Franciscan Church, are rarely to be found anywhere else in the world. The Crucifixion, in the refectory of the Dominican convent (illustration 47) is typical of an epoch of ardent faith and spontaneous religious emotion. Unfortunately, the tempestuous ages that have passed over the city, with fires and invasions, have not suffered many such relics to be preserved. Master Vitus Stoss himself, whose merits were so great in reforming all departments of Cracow's medieval art, had also been the first one (about 1485) to execute copper engravings in a true painter's spirit and with a fine sense of the rules of design. One of his drawings for the altar of Bamberg is to be found in the archaeological cabinet of Cracow University. At the same time foreign artists and merchants coming to Cracow brought woodcuts and copperplates, chiefly German work, into the town; these, of course, could not fail to exercise some direct influence on the imagination and workmanship of Cracow's painters. Thus, a miniature in the MSS. collection of the Chapter is copied from an engraving by Franz of Bocholt, or Israël of Meckenen.

Applied art, in the Gothic period, has the same origin as the plastic arts; its monuments are mostly products of native industry. The magnificent seals used by kings and princes are