Decorative Arts in Poland [antikvár]

THE ROMANESQUE Crafts, and the decorative arts, have been practiced ever since the Stone Age in the areas in which the Polish state emerged towards the end of the first millennium of our era — that is, within more or less the same frontiers, following innumerable changes through the ages, as it has had since the Second World War. However, this early period is not really part of the history of Polish art, if only because the ethnic character of the peoples who in the primitive stage of humán history had inhabited what are now Polish territories cannot be ascertained. Finely worked items of silverware, decorated with filigree and granular ornament, coming from the second half of the first millennium, may already be attributed without any doubt to Sla-vonic craftsmen. The emergence of the primitive Polish and Slavonic castle was accompanied by the evolut-ion of a series of ancillary settlements, which grew up in the neighbourhood of the fortified centre, supplying it with products for cultivation and breeding, and at the same time, objects of decorative art. Poland was a powerful country under the rule of the first Piast kings, and the richness of the higher levels of Polish society at the turn of the first and second millennium, is reflected in an account written about a hundred years later by "Gallus Anonymous". In his chronicle we read that, from the time of Boleslas the Brave (992—1025) "not only the barons but even the ordinary knightly classes wore gold chains of extreme value, while the inhabitants were extraordinarily well-to-do. The ladies of the court went so burdened with golden crowns, necklaces, gold chains, bracelets, jewels, and gold headpieces that if their retainers had not supported them, they could not have supported the weight of metál". Excavations have illustrated these and other types of jewellery deriving from the workshops of Polish goldsmiths in the 10th and 11 th centuries. They include rings, silver temple bands, 2, 3 medallions decorated with niello, ear rings and bracelets with filigree ornament. An artistic character can alsó be discerned in earthenware products which already possessed, in this early period, a centuries old tradition. In 966, Poland officially accepted Christianity, which had first crossed her frontiers even earlier. The fact that it came from Romé rather than Byzantium determined the country's becoming part of the western cultural community. The acceptance of Christianity inevitably led to the appearance in Poland of objects of sacral decorative art, brought first from foreign countries with which Poland had ecclesiastical, political or dynastic ties, such as Saxony,