The story
For roughly two decades after the Second World War, the famous Cranach kept at Wrocław Cathedral was a copy. The original, the Madonna under the Fir Tree by Lucas Cranach the Elder, had been painted on a linden panel around 1510 for Jan Turzo, the bishop of Wrocław. In the confusion after the war a German pastor, Siegfried Zimmer, had a copy made, handed it over as the real thing and left for Germany with the original.
The swap came to light in the 1960s, when Daniela Stankiewicz, a restorer at the National Museum in Wrocław, saw the cathedral picture and declared it a copy, and not a good one. The panel itself came back only in 2012, and it is now the most valuable work in the Archdiocesan Museum.
The museum stands on Ostrów Tumski, the cathedral island and the oldest part of the city. Cardinal Georg Kopp founded it in 1898 to look after church art from Silesian parishes, and after a long renovation it reopened in December 2024. Alongside medieval sculpture and altarpieces from the region, it shows objects from the collection of Cardinal Henryk Gulbinowicz, among them the mummy of a young Egyptian boy from the last centuries before Christ and clay tablets written in cuneiform.
