Sukiennice by night

Standing in the middle of the Market Square, Sukiennice [Cloth Hall] is the pearl of the city's Renaissance architecture and one of its most characteristic monuments. Initially, it was in this building that the city's trade was concentrated, gathering merchants selling cloth, which was a luxury commodity and brought huge profits to the city treasury, because following the royal privilege, visiting cloth merchants could sell their goods only in the place designated for this purpose. No wonder that when the building was destroyed by fire in the middle of the 16th century, quick reconstruction started. The best architects worked on it, artists and craftsmen who often came to Poland from Italy following Queen Bona, the wife of King Sigismund I the Old (her 17th-century portrait can be seen in the Gallery of European Painting). The renovated Sukiennice was then given a long attic with a crest decorated with mascarons –grotesque, stylised human heads. The Renaissance structure survived in almost unchanged form until the 1870s. Jan Matejko took part in the subsequent reconstruction of the building by supporting the chief architect Tomasz Pryliński, but also by designing some of the wooden stalls placed along the inner walls of the commercial route.

The shape in which Sukiennice was depicted on the canvas by Józef Czajkowski, an artist strongly associated with the Kraków artistic environment at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The painter, like many Polish artists of that time, through the sketchy brushstroke unerringly conveyed the imaginative essence of the forms of nature and suggestively brought out nostalgic tones, maintained in a dark and earthy palette, creating a melancholic aura in nocturne of the city, a painting depicting a night scene.