Virtues and vices. Design for a stained-glass window in the presbytery of St. Mary’s Church in Kraków

This 1891 design for a stained-glass window depicting Virtues and Vices for the presbytery of St Mary's Church in Kraków is an early work by Wyspiański, predating his most celebrated windows but demonstrating the ambition and scholarly seriousness with which he approached ecclesiastical design from the start of his career. St Mary's Basilica, one of Kraków's most important Gothic churches overlooking the central market square, was a prestigious site for such a commission. The programme of Virtues and Vices — a standard medieval allegorical scheme — required Wyspiański to engage with both iconographic tradition and the constraints of Gothic window geometry: elongated lancets, tracery divisions, and the requirement for figures readable from a distance in coloured light. Executed in watercolour, this design captures his developing mastery of the stained-glass medium through a two-dimensional pictorial equivalent, translating the jewel tones of leaded glass into transparent washes.

Watercolour on paper is an ideal medium for stained-glass design — its transparency mimics the light-transmitting quality of coloured glass, and the layering of washes can approximate the depth of medieval glazing. Wyspiański uses bold outlines to represent leading, with flat areas of wash standing in for individual glass pieces. The 1891 date shows early but confident compositional control.