Pałac Pusłowskich w Krakowie, Kraków

Pałac Pusłowskich is the villa before you, a protected historic building in central Kraków. Its defining transformation came in eighteen eighty-six, after Count Zygmunt Pusłowski bought the property and had it reshaped by Tadeusz Stryjeński and Władysław Ekielski. Notice the two-storey corner loggia, carried on arches and piers: it belongs to that redesign, which gave the house a Neo-Renaissance character, reviving the visual language of Renaissance Italy.

The story below the villa is older still. Barrel-vaulted cellars retain traces of a former granary and house that stood here around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pusłowski filled the renewed residence with art, including works by Matejko, Malczewski, Rubens and Delacroix, alongside Gothic and Renaissance sculpture, tapestries, antique arms and a library of forty thousand volumes.

A chapel held a sixteenth-century late-Gothic triptych and a stained-glass design by Jan Matejko. The collections survived the German occupation, though they were later divided. Today the palace houses the Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Musicology. Outside the villa, the 2011 monument honors pianist and statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski.