Pałac w Krakowie-Prokocimiu - nieznane założenie z rotundą w narożu
The Pałace in Cracow-Prokocim - An Unknown Complex with a Rotunda in the Corner

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the history of a pałace located in Prokocim, a district of Cracow, morę precisely, with the first stage of its construction, in Classicist style, which was carried out at the times when the property had been owned by the Wodzicki family. The (incomplete) archival materials of the Wodzicki family, held in the Ossoliński Institute in Wrocław, enabled a reconstruction of the history of the complex in the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The following stylistic and comparative analyses, possible thanks to the two printed views showing the palace before its subsequent Neo-Baroque remodelling in the 1870S that were discovered in the research, have revealed that the palace belongs to a group of the so-called palaces with a rotunda in the corner, thus named by Tadeusz S. Jaroszewski who ascribed them to Chrystian Piotr Aigner. Regrettably, the preserved archival and iconographic materials did not unequivocally specify the period when exactly the complex had been built in the Classicist forms, and since no plans or designs have been preserved, there are no grounds for speculation as to the original idea of the palace, its possible architect or builders. The first part of the article, based on archival materials, outlines the different stages of construction of the palace complex and its gardens. Next, thanks to the above-mentioned iconographic sources, the appearance of the palace at the turn of the nineteenth century has been reconstructed. Further, the author analyses the relationships between the Prokocim complex and a group of palaces with a rotunda in the corner located on Polish lands and, based on examples in European architecture, suggests a possible derivation of this architectural pattern.

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