Obraz i tekst : południowoniderlandzka deska przykazań (tiengebodenbord) z kościoła św. Jakuba Starszego w Szczaworyżu

During a restoration of a 17th century painting depicting Virgin with Child (from St. Jacob’s Church in Szczaworyż) carried at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2013, a damaged Southern-Netherlandish Ten Commandments panel (tiengebodenbord) was discovered. The panel in question formed a base on which the catholic image had been stretched and it had been cut off to match its size (104.5 x 73.5 cm). In this paper the author attempts to reconstruct its historical, artistic and confessional background, iconography and the linguistic analyses of the commandments serving as the main point of reference. Having compared the text with the16th century Dutch translations of the Bible, then, having placed the work in the context of similar panels depicting Moses (actually, only 6 of them exist), and finding out that both the text and image are in many cases inconsistent with the reformed doctrine, the author comes to conclusion that the discovered painting may be the earliest example of a tiengebodenbord known and can be dated at ca. 1570-1580, i.e. at the time when the Calvinist programme of the church interior decoration was gradually crystallizing in the Netherlands. Moreover, the panel could have come from the Netherlands to Gdańsk, where it was most possibly joined with Virgin with Child and the gilded silver clothes and crowns were added in the workshop of Hans Paul Junge in ca. 1660.