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Kraków. Villa Decius

Kraków. Villa Decius

Kraków. Villa Decius

Kraków. Villa Decius

Kraków. Villa Decius

Kraków. Villa Decius

The villa of Iustus Ludovicius Decius (Polish: Justus Ludwik Decjusz) built in Wola Chełmska (today's Wola Justowska, named after the name of the dignitary) in the 1530s is one of the most famous and beautiful examples of residential architecture in Poland. Built on the initiative of the secretary to King Sigismund I, it was modelled on the suburban villas around Florence and Rome fashionable in the Europe of the time as they provided a place for leisure, meetings, and philosophical disputes. It is a work (1533/34-ca 1535) of the construction company set up by Giovanni Cini of Siena, Bernardino de Gianotis, and Filippo of Fiesole after completion of the works on the Sigismund Chapel. In its original shape it had one storey, with the interiors laid out on three axes, and was connected to a parterre garden which was considered a marvel by the court poet Klemens Janicki. Located on the eastern slope of the hill, its main façade faces Kraków.

The residence was surrounded by gardens and a park. It is assumed that the garden design was composed of two parts: a larger parterre garden, and another garden of the giardino secreto type. The adjacent forested hills were a compositional complement to the complex. The whole three-storey-high arcaded loggia present between the two alcove towers is today a product of a redevelopment performed under Stanisław Lubomirski in the first quarter of the 17th century.

Currently, the residence and park complex consists of the Villa Decius building and two subsidiary buildings: Łaski House from the 1630s and Erasmus House built early in the 21st century, with the Decius Park surrounding them. Since 1996, the main building has been the seat of the Villa Decius Association.

The three-storey-high building was built around 1530-1535 on a rectangular plan. The ground floor and the undercroft have retained the original tripartite division, with the hallway providing the central axis. The connection of the northern and central bays on the first floor made it possible to set up the so-called 'grand hall': the palatium. Most probably due to a design change during the construction work, the level of the cellar floor was lowered which resulted in the exposing of the foundations made of white stone blocks in the cellars. The above ground sections of the walls and ceilings were made of brick. The hallway and the side bays of the ceilings received barrel vaulting. The side bays of the ground floor also had their ceilings, as did the hallway between them - this last a ceiling resting on beams as attested by the sockets for beams present in the coving of the current ceiling of the hallway. In the west, a small, centrally situated extension provided an antechamber to the main hallway, and perhaps also had a loggia connected to the grand hall of the first floor. The eastern front wall had four windows at the level of the ground floor and another four on the first; the northern wall had three, and the southern probably only two. Two cellar windows from that period at ground floor level have been preserved. They are both visible from the terrace and have stone frames and openings for a grating to be set in at an angle. This type of window can be found in the Renaissance architecture of Kanonicza Street in Kraków. The windows of the ground and first floors are set along an axis, which is a testimony to the modern character of the architectural solution applied. Six simple stone portals are preserved in what today is the cellar and which used to be the undercroft. Only one of these, positioned in the central bay whose threshold is set high above the level of the current cellar floor, has retained its original position. It leads to the Western extension, preserved only at cellar level. The remaining portals have been reset, possibly only lowered due to the transformation and lowering of the level of the cellar floor. A stone window jamb, exposed from under the render, has rich Renaissance profiling and sockets for the setting of a grate. This gives an idea of the decorative Renaissance framing of the windows on the ground and first floor levels of the residence.

A fundamental and certainly innovative element of Decius's 16-century design was the implementation of the full programme of a Renaissance villa and the application of pioneering architectonic solutions which provides proof of the Italian Renaissance contributing an era in Polish history.

In 1996, the Decius Villa was restored to its former splendour by an effort of the Municipality of Kraków. The Villa Decius Association, managing the villa and its park, continues with the humanist spirit of its patron and finds its objective in the development of a forum for the dialogue of cultures. In this way, it promotes pluralism and tolerance in public life, devoting special attention to the rights and cultures of national and ethnic minorities. To this end all the programmes of the Association are based on the idea of meetings between representatives of various fields of science and culture, nations, and areas of interest, as well as the idea of intellectual exchange and the pursuit of incentives to creative work.

The epitaph devoted to Anna Decjuszówna, the daughter of Iustus Ludovicius Decius, and to Andrzej Rottermund can be found in the Kraków Church of St Mary. It presents marble architectural decoration in the form of a cornice supported on pilasters terminating in Ionic capitals, with vegetal decoration. The line of the cornice is broken by a cartouche with the coat of arms of the Rottermunds (divided party per fess, with an anchor in the upper and carp in the lower field). The centrally situated figure presents a person praying before Christ crucified. It is one of the few material items related to the presence of Decius in Kraków.

Seweryn Boner, banker to King Sigismund the Old and a nephew of Jan Boner (one of the closest collaborators of Decius), was buried in the family chapel of St John the Baptist at Saint Mary's. The bronze tombstones of Seweryn (1538) and Zofia (after 1532) Boner, cast by the Hans Vischer workshop in Nuremberg, that are found in the chapel are believed to be among the best works of early Renaissance sculpture in Poland.

By the mid-16th century, the Renaissance turned from an elitist Italian 'fashion' present solely at the Royal Court into a phenomenon common throughout Kraków. This was true both of the commissioners (the patronage of the ecclesiastical authorities and wealthy bourgeoisie) and the artists and builders. Its dissemination and greater variety were accompanied by a drop in the quality of the architecture being developed. The most splendid projects from the first half of the 16th century were treated as models, yet their forms were already being styled in the spirit of mannerism. The dominant Florentine tradition used to be enriched with elements from northern Italy and even the Netherlands. The workshop of Berrecci closed down its operations, yet there were an increasing number of constructors-sculptors emerging and they were growing to a number that became much greater than that at the beginning of the century. With Italian forms becoming popular, the stylistic differences between individual workshops were no longer directly dependent on the nationality of the architects.

Iustus Ludovicius Decius and the Italian Renaissance architects introduced a type of construction that had previously been unknown in the capital of Poland: a suburban villa surrounded by a garden. Thanks to new constructional solutions (barrel and lunette vaulting) and detail (parapet walls, arcaded loggias with columns, ornaments borrowed from antiquity, portals modelled on triumphal arches, six-field window framing, akin to Gothic composition) they contributed to the transformation of architectural types derived from mediaeval traditions: e.g. a residence with a courtyard, a townhouse.

Motifs drawn from treatises by Sebastiano Serlio were becoming more widespread in outstanding buildings , the best example of such treatment is the thorough remodelling of the original Villa Decius ordered (before 1632) by Stanisław Lubomirski, and inspired by the design of the Villa di Poggioreale (a symmetrical plan with the hallway on the axis, and a façade with a loggia framed by towers - extensions). Moreover, the composition of the loggia points to its connection with the workshop serving the Lubomirski family in Wiśnicz.

The discovery and interpretation of relics of a four-flight staircase from the period situated in the southern alcove connects the villa in Wola Justowska even more closely to selected works by Sebastiano Serlio where such solutions are present. Marks associated with the attachment of the old ceiling and a system of window and door openings connected to it were found in the walls of the alcove.