Architecture of the Order of Trinitarians in the lands of the former Republic of Poland

On behalf of the Museum of Ar­chi­tec­ture in Wrocław and the Wrocław Branch of the As­so­ci­a­tion of Art His­to­ri­ans, we invite you to a lecture by Mirosława Sobczyńska-Szczepańska, PhD, ded­i­cated to the ar­chi­tec­ture of the Order of Trini­tar­i­ans in the lands of the former Re­pub­lic of Poland.

The lecture will take place on Thurs­day 27 Feb­ru­ary at 17:00 and it will be pre­sented in polish.

The Broth­ers of the Order of the Holy Trinity from the Slave Ransom, brought to the Re­pub­lic of Poland in 1685, erected nine­teen brick church and monastery build­ings within its pre-par­ti­tion borders. Their ar­chi­tec­ture is not subject to a clear as­sess­ment. The build­ings which are part of the local build­ing tra­di­tion are dis­tin­guished by those in which rare or pre­vi­ously unused so­lu­tions were applied in the Pol­ish-Lithuan­ian state. The church in Vilnius Antokol (1694 - c.1740), built on the plan of a regular octagon, has a domed vault, twice as high as the walls, and a façade with di­ag­o­nal towers. The central or cen­tral-long temple in Te­ofilpol (c. 1740-1746), crowned with a mon­u­men­tal dome on the tambour, pre­ceded by a two-tower two-tower façade, was the most out­stand­ing example of the re­cep­tion desk de­signed by Carl Fontana for Ec­cle­sia Tri­umphans. The churches in Trini­topol (1715-1721) and Orsha (1725-1735), founded on the plan of an elon­gated octagon, with a trans­verse axis ac­cented with transept chapels, are ahead of other Pol­ish-Lithuan­ian temples with such an in­te­rior, ad­di­tion­ally en­riched with di­ag­o­nal chapels. The Bor­romean forms of the façade of the Cracow Trini­tar­ian Church (1752-1758), de­signed by Francesco Placidi, make it one of the leading Polish pro­jects in the radical Baroque trend. This group also in­cludes the cen­tral-long church in Kro­to­szyn (1767-1774), erected in a canopy con­struc­tion, with a ”two-layer” struc­ture and a dynamic, one-tower façade, con­sid­ered to be the best Polish stamp of in­flu­ence by Kilian Ignaz Di­entzen­hofer, the con­tin­u­a­tor of Guarin Guarini’s cre­ative ex­per­i­ments. The facades of the Trini­tar­ian temples in Lutsk (1720-1729) and Brahilov (1767-c. 1780) attract at­ten­tion with a com­po­si­tion based on the in­ter­pen­e­tra­tion of the great and small order, in which an echo of the scheme created by Andrea Pal­la­dio re­sounds. Trini­tar­ian axial en­sem­bles were or were to be formed in Brest-on-the-Bug, Amber, Brahilov, Lviv (in the Ha­lyt­sky suburb), Te­ofil­pole and Tomaszów Lubel­ski. The monks who came from Spain were able to adapt to the new social and cul­tural re­al­i­ties and dif­fer­ent build­ing tra­di­tions, without giving up on trans­plant­ing new con­cepts to the Pol­ish-Lithuan­ian soil. The result of this at­ti­tude is a group of build­ings char­ac­ter­ized by in­no­v­a­tive forms and high artis­tic class.

We invite you!