The requirements of the expanding University led to the
creation of a special type of college-house. The floor plan of
colleges was based on monastic architecture, with rooms grouped
around a rectangular courtyard. The grandest and best preserved
example is Collegium Maius, which arrived at its current form in
the last years of the century. The courtyard of the college is
encircled with a Late Gothic cloister, like the loggias of Italian
universities.

The decline of the travelling building companies which began
in the early fifteenth century, led to a loosening of ties between
stoneworkers and sculptors, and, in turn, to a decline in the
quality and amount of architectural sculpture. Brick elevations of
buildings were enlivened by checkered patterns of overburnt or
differently coloured bricks. Decorative stonework was limited
to simple architectural motifs. Only the facades of the most
grandiose edifices were given stone facings with the distinctive,
vertical fluting which had already appeared in the previous
century. The best examples are the Jagiellonian chapels built onto
the western side of the Cathedral, and the vestibule of St Ca-
therine’s, founded by Cardinal Olesnicki.

Painting replaced sculpture as the typical form of architectural
decoration. The majority of sculptors now worked in wood,
which was usually gilded and polychromed, and their methods
came close to those employed by panel painters. Painters and
sculptors treated the same subjects, drawn from the same icono-
graphy. They worked under the same guild, often combining the
two professions; painting and sculpture developed along similar
stylistic lines. A type of winged retable with coexisting sculptural
and painted elements gained a great popularity.

In Late Gothic sculpture religious themes still predominated.
The early pieces were almost exclusively individual figures, some-
times grouped together in a retable, which around mid-century
became a polyptych with folding wings. In such a structure
a sculptured central section is often flanked by painted wings. The
crowning achievement of Late Gothic altarpieces is the large

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