Architecture
Early Polish baroque buildings were often designed by foreign (most often, Italian) architects. The first baroque structure in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the Corpus Christi Church in Nieśwież (now in Belarus). The first baroque building in present-day Poland was the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Kraków by Giovanni Battista Trevano. The Jewish population in this period was large and prosperous, and many handsome Polish Jewish synagogues were built in baroque style. A handful of these buildings survive, including the Włodawa Synagogue.
Secular Baroque architecture also grew. The royal Warsaw Castle was reconstructed between 1596 and 1619 by the Italian architects Giacomo Rotondo, Matteo Castelli and Jan Trevano. Outside the Castle, a column with the Statue of King Zygmunt, sculpted by Clemente Molli and cast by Daniel Tym was raised by his son, Władysław IV Waza, in 1644. Park Ujazdowski with a new palace, the palace of Ujazdów, was built by Trevano between 1619 and 1625. Palace of Ujazdów was soon overshadowed the Wilanów Palace, raised by King John III Sobieski between 1677 and 1696. Style of those new royal mansions was soon imitated by numerous magnates who did not want to fall behind the times, leading to numerous baroque residences springing throughout Polish countryside, such as the Kruszyna (1630, built for Voivode Kasper Doenhoff), Łańcut (1629–1641, rebuilt for Stanisław Lubomirski), Wiśnicz (1616–1621, also for Stanisław Lubomirski), Ujazd (Krzyżtopór built in 1628-1644 for Krzysztof Ossoliński).
Read more about this topic: Baroque In Poland
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