Kinsberg House, a place fit for a prince to live in… Grodno Castle in modern times (16th and 18th centuries) in the light of historiographic sources and field research

Agnieszka Gryglewska

doi:10.37190/arc210405

Abstract

The subject of the article is the early modern remodeling and extensions of the medieval Grodno Castle (Kinsberg) at the time when it was the seat of the von Logau family, i.e. Matthäus, Kaspar and Georg, in the years 1545–1595, and its subsequent transformations until 1823. Purchased then by Johann Gustav Gottlieb Büsching, the castle was secured and turned into a romantic ruin. The studies were based on the analysis of German historical research, mainly from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, using the sources which were either incomplete or lost in 1945. Historical descriptions of buildings and an attempt at interpreting them were presented. Preserved iconographic materials and the field research, which was conducted in the years 2019–2021 by a team of scientists from the Department of History of Architecture, Art and Technology of Wrocław University of Science and Technology, were also taken into consideration.     The aim of the article was to present the architecture of the castle in its heyday. The discussed early modern phase of its remodeling turned out to be a consistently implemented and completed concept of rebuilding the late-gothic castle from the beginning of the 16th century into an elegant Renaissance residence which consisted of a three-winged body of the upper castle closed with a curtain wall, crowned with a high roof surrounded by an attic, with an internal courtyard and a tower; then the middle castle, outer bailey and lower castle. In terms of the quality of architecture and its design, Grodno Castle could compete with Silesian princely residences at the end of the 16th century.

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