Rozproszony, lecz nie zaginiony. Losy poliptyku św. Mikołaja z około 1435 roku z kościoła Najświętszej Marii Panny w Gdańsku

The altarpiece of St Nicholas (ca. 1435) from St Mary’s Church in Gdańsk was donated by the Guild of Brewers. From 15th century to the Second World War it was on display in the same church. During the war and the evacuation, the elements of that retable were separated from each other. After 1945 it was believed that only four double-sided painted wings have been preserved to this day. Other elements: the corpus and the figure of St Nicholas, - were considered as wartime losses. Due to laconic information in written sources it was almost impossible to recognize elements of that retable among many artworks with unknown provenance. Thanks to the glass plate negative kept at the National Museum in Gdańsk and one photo from Willi Drost’s photo collection archive kept at the Herder Institute in Marburg, the Author of the present paper recognized in the ’corpus from unknown altarpiece’ from the National Museum in Gdańsk (inv. no. MNG/SD/46/Rz) the corpus of the Altarpiece of St Nicholas. It was also possible to finally recognize another element from that retable: the figure of St Nicholas, which has been on display in St Barbara’s Church in Gdańsk probably since the 1980s. This paper is an attempt to recreate different vicissitudes of each part of one altarpiece following WW II.