Gniezno Doors

The Gniezno Doors (Polish: Drzwi Gnieźnieńskie) are a pair of bronze doors at the entrance to Gniezno Cathedral in Gniezno, Poland, a Gothic building which the doors pre-date, having been carried over from an earlier building. They are decorated with eighteen scenes in bas-relief from the life of St. Adalbert, or Wojciech in Polish, whose remains had been bought for their weight in gold (shown in scene 16), and carried back to the cathedral and set up in a shrine there. They were made in about 1175 during the reign of Mieszko III the Old and are one of the most significant works of Romanesque art in Poland.

Locating the origin of the doors has been the subject of much discussion. It is clear that their style derives from the Mosan area in modern Belgium and France. Their place of manufacture has been argued to be Hildesheim (home of the famous Bernward Doors of about 1015), Bohemia, Flanders (perhaps Liege), or locally. Swartzenski says "design and wax model, Liege (?)" but "cast in Gniezno (?)", "soon after 1127", but this date now seems very much a minority view - it was the year when St Adalbert's head was "recovered", not having been with the initial batch of relics. Another possibility is that the artists and craftsmen were imported from further West for the commission, perhaps easier than transporting the single piece of the left door, either in wax or bronze form, across much of Europe. At this time the Polish church had strong links with the Archdiocese of Cologne and the home area of Mosan art, which led Western European metalwork at this date. The question has not been settled by the discovery during restoration work in 1956 of partly effaced inscriptions reading "me fecit me...us", "petrus" and "bovo luitinius/latinus", probably giving the name of the craftsman in charge of the casting. These mean "made by" ... "Peter" ..." of ? [place]", with the "luitinius" location probably referring either one the four Lutins in modern Poland (not all possible candidates at this date), or Lille in northern France not far from the Mosan region, or Lucino near Como in northern Italy. If the reading is "latinus", or "Peter the Latin made me", the meaning is even less clear, but this is regarded as the less likely reading. Neither name is known in any other contexts.

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