ARTUS COURT
This ancient building was constructed in the 15th century, between 1476 and 1481. Known today as the Cour d'Artus, formerly known as the Junkerhof, it is a magnificent Gothic hall that served as a meeting place for the city's bourgeois guilds for almost six hundred years. Its name evokes the knights of the Round Table with whom the wealthy merchants identified, a tradition that originated in England.
The Mannerist façade, designed in 1616 and 1617 by Abraham Van Den Blocke, is absolutely superb. It features distinctive arcades with statues of Scipio the African, Judas Maccabaeus, Marius Camillus and Themistocles, surmounted by the allegories of Strength and Justice. A statue of the goddess Fortune can be seen at the top of the building. Only the façade of the building was preserved when it was rebuilt after the Second World War. Today, it houses a branch of the Gdańsk History Museum, which brings together works of art contributed by the various brotherhoods that have sat here over the centuries. The centerpiece is an earthenware stove, 10.64 m high and 2.5 m wide, built in 1545 and covered with 520 painted tiles, 437 of them original. They depict the most important figures of the Catholic and Protestant worlds of the early 16th century. Dismantled and hidden by the Nazis in 1943, the work was found and restored on the basis of 15th-century plans. It was not until 1995 that its restoration was completed and it took its place in the museum.
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