Gniezno Doors - Description

Description

The left door (facing the reliefs from outside the cathedral) is 328 cm high and 84 cm wide, the right 323 cm high and 83 cm wide. Both are between 1.5 and 2.5 cm thick. They were cast in bronze using the lost wax casting technique in a mixture of copper, tin with a small amount of lead, with some fine detail being added after casting by engraving tools. The left leaf was cast in one piece, but the right was made in 24 cast sections which were then soldered together. Both the lion-headed knockers, which do not align correctly, were also cast separately and soldered. The doors of Hildesheim Cathedral, of about 1015, had pioneered the casting of a large door mostly covered with reliefs in a single piece, which was considerably more difficult than the usual technique of earlier Italian bronze doors, which used bronze relief casts fixed to a wooden core. Plain doors with no figurative decoration had already been cast whole in Germany - for example for Charlemagne's early 9th century Palatine Chapel at Aachen, following Roman techniques preserved by the Byzantines. The Gniezo left door follows the Hildesheim method. The relief is also typically much higher on the left door, as much as 75% on some figures, where few on the right door reach 25%. Around the central panels runs a decorative frieze of Mosan-style "rinceaux", or scrolling foliage, with small figures of astrological personifications and other subjects at intervals.

Adalbert had been martyred trying to convert the pagan Prussians, who are shown in some scenes, giving a rare near-contemporary record of their appearance; the Prussians remained largely pagan at the time the doors were made. To illustrate the life of a single saint on such a monumental scale was most unusual at this period, and the doors are the only Romanesque ones in Europe with such a programme. The designs perhaps followed a now lost cycle in an illuminated manuscript of the life of the saint, though even in this sort of works such an extended pictorial treatment of a saint's life was unusual. Two lives of Adalbert have survived, written around 1000, soon after his death, but no illuminated copies that throw light on the visual sources for the doors, though their texts help explain the scenes. Whatever the origin of the designs, the compositions show the borrowings from more common subject compositions to which early medieval artists usually resorted when confronted with a novel subject; devising new compositions was not part of their training. Some scenes adapt subjects from the Life of Christ and other models. The left door shows his early life and life in Christian territory; the right one his missionary activities, apparently ignoring those outside modern Poland. Their iconography "clearly shows they were made as a political statement".

The only comparable bronze doors in Poland were those made in Magdeburg in about 1150 for Plock Cathedral, using a much less advanced style and technique; however these were carried off during the Middle Ages by a Russian army, and installed in Saint Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod, where they remain. Plock now has 20th century replicas in place.