ABSTRACT
Kraków’s red-brick Collegium Maius, the oldest Italianate quadrangle north of the Alps, today houses the Jagiellonian University Museum. Among the prize treasures in its permanent collections are astronomical instruments associated with Copernicus, a preserved eighteenth-century chocolate from a royal salon, a rare statuette of King Kazimierz the Great and a splendid gilt processional mace produced for Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon at the end of the fifteenth century. The mace is just over a metre long, its stem engraved with geometrical designs; gold daisies and twisting leaves are carved around its base and three coats of arms in coloured enamels nestle in its crown. This item has long excited art historians interested in the development of high-gothic style and sculptural techniques and goldsmith production in Kraków around the year 1500. It is also, however, a profoundly political object with much to tell us beyond the narrowly stylistic.
