Veit Stoss/Wit Stwosz Contextualized within the Polish Tradition of Sculpture in the Late Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Veit Stoss (ca. 1438/1447-1533), a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), was one of the most prominent limewood sculptors of the late fifteenth-early sixteenth century in Central Europe. Stoss worked in Nuremberg for a majority of his career, commissioned by its leading patrician families to make various pieces of limewood sculpture for the city's churches. His work in Nuremberg was interrupted by a nearly twenty-year stay in Krakow, Poland, from 1477 until 1496, where he undertook two monumental sculptural projects that remain his earliest extant works today, the multi-winged altarpiece of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (1477-1489) done in limewood and the red marble tomb effigy for King Casimir IV Jagiellon (1492). Previous scholarship on Stoss has focused on the commission of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, but has ignored the importance of this work both within the artist's large artistic development and within the already existing tradition of wood sculpture in late-fifteenth-century Poland. What is more, many twentieth-century German and Polish art historians have mobilized Stoss's career anachronistically within modern nationalist frameworks to support their own political agendas, choosing to ignore the cosmopolitanism of Krakow's mixed population and the dynamic hybrid nature of his works' iconography and artistic style. This thesis seeks to move beyond the limiting and distorting lens of earlier nationalist agendas with the aim to restore Stoss to his historical context as an artist who borrowed stylistically from painting, prints, and sculpture, and who met the demands of diverse patrons, both in Germany and in Poland, by creating a dynamic hybridity of styles, local and foreign.