Madonna Sculpture at Malbork Castle
Malbork Castle was certainly living up to its billing as the largest castle by land area. Visitors would have to walk quite a bit to get to the main castle. Even then, visitors would just be looking at the castle itself. It seems that there are three individual castles here, but I can’t tell the difference between them. In fact, the castle building itself didn’t seem to be quite impressive apart from being made of brick. It seems that the residents of the castle didn’t really care much about how the castle looked as long as it served their purpose. Well, that is not entirely true. There was one part which the builders decided to pay special attention to.
Church at Malbork Castle
Walking along the inner walls of the castle, one can see what appears to be church like structure as part of the castle buildings. More importantly, there was a large sculpture of the Madonna. This is a striking different from the rather dull exterior of the church. It is not very obvious from here but the Madonna sculpture is actually a 3D mosaic. One would need to use binoculars to see the detail of the mosaic. In World War II, the sculpture of the Madonna was totally destroyed. The castle itself was half destroyed, this was a lot since the castle was large. Eventually, the castle was rebuilt but it was more challenging to rebuild the Madonna sculpture. Somehow a cast of the sculptures’ head was taken some years back and computers were used to reconstruct the rest of the body. The color was a bit of a challenge since there weren’t a lot of colored photos of this. I don’t know how they ended up deciding what color it should be but as of 2016, the reconstruction of sculpture of the Madonna at Malbork Castle was completed.
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