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discovered in the vaults of the cathedral, together with fragments
of the three windows from the nave, though originally
there had been four of them. Unfortunately they were
preserved only in fragments, as a pile of small pieces of glass
panes. One of the chancel windows, St Paul [Fig. 190] could
be restored, whereas too few fragments exist of St Augustine
for the window to be reconstructed. After renovation and
partial reconstruction St Paul has been mounted in the
south transept, over the Crucifixion. The composition shows
the standing saint, while tearing open the gown to show the
christogram on his bare breasts. In the semi-circle above
the apostle’ s head are shown the dove of the Holy Ghost and
the Priests of the Old and New Testament. The six semicircles
on his either side depict events illustrating the Letters
of St Paul (or alluding to events described in them).
It is worth noticing that the two saints – Paul the Apostle
and Augustine – were missing from the ‘pantheon’ of
great personalities in Church history depicted in the Crucifixion.
It is not known, however, and nearly impossible
to find out, where each of the stained-glass windows was
originally placed. There are good reasons for both St Paul
and St Augustine to have been located over the scene with
the crucified Christ. The former saint could have been represented
there because of his authorship of the inscription
(1 Cor. 1:23–24) and as a traditional counterpart to St Peter,
whereas the latter could have been understood as a match
for St Thomas Aquinas.
* * *
Paintings in the nave depict episodes which, on the one
hand, were preparatory to the ‘mysteries of the faith’ shown
in the chancel, and on the other hand – were their consequences.
The murals on the south wall of the nave show
the events preceding the Incarnation whereas those on
the north side present an assembly of saints, whose lives
were the result of the adoption of truths depicted in the
chancel, and of their decision to imitate Christ. The ensemble
will be discussed beginning with the south wall of the
nave, from the west, following the direction of entering the
church from Krakowska Street, through the portal newly
built by Mączyński in 1909–1910.
Abraham’ | Abraham’ s Sacrifice s Sacrifice of Isaac of and Isaac the and stained- the stainedglass
windows depicting depicting The Mysteries The Mysteries ‘worshipping
glass
windows
‘worshipping the unknown the but unknown presumed but presumed God’ God’
The decorative as well as iconographic centrepiece of the
first bay on the south wall (S I), much narrower than the
other two bays, is a tall window filled with a stained-glass
panel, depicting the three ancient sacrifices-mysteries offered
to the ‘unknown God’, enclosed in three medallions
(from bottom to top: The Mithraic Mysteries, The Procession
of Isis in Egypt and Orpheus Playing the Lyre), which
were meant to be pre-Christian sacrifices [Fig. 192]. The
inscription at the bottom of the window is a quotation
(written in Greek) from Clement’ s of Alexandria Protreptikos
pros Hellenas (Exhortation to the Greeks), where he
presents the Greek philosophy as the precursor to Christianity.
A scene representing Abraham’ s Sacrifice of Isaac is
painted on the wall above the window [Figs 193–194]. On
a neatly arranged stack of wood in the centre, there lies the
youthful Isaac, with hands tied on his breasts. To the right,
one can see the mighty figure of Abraham, a grey-bearded
old man, dressed in a red tunic and a billowing dark-blue
coat. Its stirring folds emphasise the energetic gesture of
Abraham’ s right hand holding a dagger, with which he is
about to stab his son. An angel standing on the left, in a long
yellow tunic decorated with Byzantine embroidery, thwarts
the blow. In the bottom right corner of the composition the
painter placed a lamb’ s head, thus alluding to a traditional
element of the scene: the lamb that replaced Isaac on the
sacrificial altar. However, due to extensive damages to the
paint layer, the lamb’ s head is known only from an archival
photograph. The three mysteries, the ancient sacrifices
to the ‘unknown God’ shown in the stained-glass window
below the painting continue the theme of sacrifice that Abraham
is about to offer to Yahweh on the wall just above
the window. Chronologically, the ancient sacrifices in the
stained-glass windows should be ‘read’ from top to bottom,
starting with the earliest Orpheus (c. 6 th c. BC), through
the Procession of Isis (c. 3 rd /2 nd c. BC) to a Mithraic Offering
(c. 2 nd /3 rd c. AD). Additionally, the descending order
of ‘reading’ of the whole line of representations is imposed
on them by the location of the first offering, i.e., chronologically,
that of Abraham, at the very top of the wall. But
regardless of the mutual spatial relationship of the scenes,
what is important here is the juxtaposition of the ‘Judaeic’
(Abraham’ s) sacrifice with the three ‘Hellenistic’ mysteries
(Orpheus, Isis and Mithra). Therefore a mention has to be
made again of Tadeusz Zieliński and of his writings dealing
with the above-mentioned historical problems. The rather
risky chronological associations between phenomena from
distant cultures and religions, presented above, reflect the
author’ s conviction that the iconography of the scenes depicted
in this bay (much more than any other part of the
painted decoration of the cathedral) was influenced by the
theories of Zieliński, the great philologist. In the introduction
to his book on Hellenist religions, Zieliński wrote: ‘in
this book [...] I have adopted not a theological but a cultu-
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