This is a polychrome wooden sculpture depicting a kneeling angel with a candlestick in his left hand. The figure is dressed in a long dark green tunic and a brown coat.
The sculpture was found in the destroyed chapel of St. Kunegunda on Boczaniec, on the 1^st level of the Wieliczka Salt Mine.

 

Rectangular, closed with a trifoliate arch, with the figures of Moses (on the left) and Aaron (on the right), and the Decalogue tables (in the middle), with the initial words of the commandments engraved in Hebrew. The figures of Moses and Aaron are flanked by spiral columns. On their plinths are Hebrew inscriptions marking the date: on the right plinth, תקס ("560"), on the left: לפק (“according to the abbreviated calculation”) [=1800]. In the three-leaf top, three openwork crowns with colourful glasses are attached.

The figurine comes from an Orthodox church in Dubno, a village located near the Slovakian border, to the south-east of Muszyna. It is one of the few examples of folk Orthodox church sculptures in the collection of the Museum in Nowy Sącz. It is worth noting that it was made by a highly skilled folk artist.

St. Kinga was presented in art in two ways – as a young person in a rich princess’s costume or as an older nun in the Poor Clare habit. Jan Matejko made a deliberate statement of both conventions and portrayed St. Kinga at the age of around 60, in the princess’s robe and with attributes referring to her life at the Poor Clares Monastery (prayer book, crosier, view of the Monastery in Stary Sącz). The model for the character was Countess Katarzyna Adamowa Potocka, known from another portrait painted by Matejko – this time in a contemporary outfit.

The Renaissance sculpture depicts a woman standing. Her right hand, which has not survived to this day, pressed a book to her chest; with the left one she holds a coattail.

Feretron (a procession float) derives from the Greek pheretron, meaning “litter” (in Latin feretrum — litter, bier, stretcher). It is an object akin to a stretcher, often with additional rods, formerly used in ancient Greece to carry the statues of deities.
Feretron is a term applied to a special type of paintings or sculptures depicting the images of saints, set on special platform, which were once used in processions during ecclesiastical ceremonies and also as a portable altar during pilgrimages.

The portable shrine with the image of Senju-Kannon Bodhisattva (Japanese: Bosatsu) was made with the use of the most valued techniques, and the precision of the fine exposure of details emphasises the high class of the exhibit.

Six-arched, closed, covered with a canopy with a small crown and a bunch of flowers at the top. The profiled rim, decorated with two appliqué, openwork bands. The crown arches, alternated with figures of birds, are in the shape of lions standing on their hind legs with the front legs resting on narrow, flat bands in the form of a twig supporting the canopy with a drapery in the shape of leaves.

The figure passes as the most perfect sculptural work of art of the so-called Beautiful style epoch (around 1400) within the Małopolska region. A repertoire of forms elaborated previously in stone sculptures was transformed into a wooden sculpture (so-called Beautiful Madonnas); characteristic cascades of folds at the sides, frontal folds running through Mary’s torso at a semicircle, shaping the letter V below, and even lower, on a pedestal spreading widely, as an optical base of the figure.

The sculpture was made of polychrome and gilded lime wood. It presents the Saint in bishop’s robes, in a lively position: his body is slightly turned to the left and bent, his left leg lunged. The bishop is holding the hem of the coat in his right hand. With his left hand, he is picking up a man with a moustache from the ground, dressed in a short hooded coat and trousers, depicted in a reduced scale.