Holy Dialogue. Sacred Art from the KUL Museum Collection

This page is adapted from the KUL Museum’s Polish-language text (there is no English page for this show). The exhibition presents works of sacred art from the KUL Museum collection, shown at the Lublin Archdiocese Museum - Trinity Tower, ul. Królewska 10, Lublin.

KUL Museum on the exhibition (our translation from the museum’s Polish text; there is no English version):

“The exhibition presents examples of exceptional works of sacred art from the KUL Museum collection which, made over the course of centuries, carry on an unceasing dialogue with the viewer contemplating them.”

What to expect

One temporary-exhibition hall on one floor of the tower, small by choice and by circumstance. The museum publishes no object count, but this is a set of a dozen or so sculptures and paintings rather than a survey of the collection, and everything in it comes from a single owner; nothing is on loan. Allow 20 to 30 minutes for the exhibition itself. If this is your first time in the tower, allow an hour and a half for the whole climb, including the viewing terrace and the cafe at the top.

The unusual part: the display was put together by sixteen second-year BA art history students of the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) and one student of the university’s interdisciplinary individual studies programme in the humanities and social sciences (MISHuS), as coursework in museum studies, supervised by Anna Szlązak-Nowak of the KUL Museum. The students also came up with the title. It shows in the result, which argues a single idea rather than parading treasures.

The objects worth the climb:

• The Holy Family altar cabinet from Kliczków, early 16th century - the oldest object here, with an apocryphal depiction of the Holy Family.
• A Madonna of 1500 - severe at first glance, and the curator’s own first pick.
• The Jerusalem cross, mid-18th century - a souvenir of the Holy Land made in a Franciscan workshop from olive wood and mother-of-pearl; very few of these survive in Europe.
• Sacra Conversazione - a small panel painting, an example of 16th-century Venetian religious painting, and the source of the show’s title.
• “Crucifixion with St Mary Magdalene” by Antoni Michalak (1902-1975) - a large canvas by a painter who taught at KUL for two decades, and one of his major works.
• “St George” by Józef Mehoffer (1869-1946) - small, late and unexpected; the museum admits it does not know how the picture entered the collection.

Rococo angels by Sebastian Zeisel, court sculptor to the Czartoryski family, and a “Miracle of St John Cantius” attributed to Tadeusz Kuntze-Konicz (1727-1793) round the display out.

Context

Sacra conversazione is a Renaissance Italian type of picture in which saints are lifted out of any narrative and placed together in one space. Their conversation is not literal; it is a visual shorthand for unity and contemplation. The exhibition takes that formula as its starting point and follows what happens to it across the centuries: the hieratic order of late Gothic altar cabinets, the stillness of the Renaissance, the theatricality of the Baroque, the compressed symbolic language of the icon, and the quieter, more individual religious images of the twentieth century. The museum frames it the same way: the display is, in its own words, “not only a spiritual contemplation but a conversation between different styles, periods and iconographic conceptions”, with Gothic and Baroque sculpture, sixteenth-century Venetian painting and Polish images of the saints meeting inside the historic tower. The curatorial essay by Mateusz Wszelaki, published on the third sub-page of the museum’s post, carries that argument from late Gothic Madonnas with Child through to twentieth-century reinterpretations of the sacred.

The second layer is the story of the collection itself, which is what explains Gothic sculpture turning up in a city that has very little of it. The first collection, donated in 1932 by canon Jan Władziński, was almost entirely looted during the Second World War; five objects survived. It was rebuilt after the war on the initiative of the painter Antoni Michalak, who persuaded the KUL rector to write to Poland’s diocesan curias asking for sculpture for teaching purposes. One curia replied, the one in Wrocław, and sent 28 sculptures, a dozen or so of them Gothic. Several dozen Baroque altar figures followed in 1956 from the central museum depot at Kozłówka. The curator’s claim, and it is not an idle one, is that no museum in eastern Poland holds a comparable body of Silesian Gothic.

Why a KUL Museum show hangs in somebody else’s tower: the KUL Museum is closed for renovation and currently has no exhibition space of its own, so its works travel. Part of the same collection is on view in parallel as Theatrum Sacrum at the Pomeranian Dukes’ Castle in Szczecin.

Tickets and time

There is no separate ticket for the exhibition. The temporary-exhibition hall is part of the tower route, so you pay the tower price: 20 PLN standard, 15 PLN reduced. A combined ticket with Lublin Cathedral, which also covers the acoustic sacristy, the treasury and the crypts, costs 26 PLN standard and 18 PLN reduced. Children under 3 enter free. There is no booking and no timed entry.

Check the hours before you set out, because the tower closes for a break in the middle of the day. It opens in two shifts with an hour’s break between them, and the time of the break depends on the day of the week. Until 30 September: Tuesday to Thursday 10:00-13:30 and 14:30-17:30, Friday 13:00-16:30 and 17:30-20:30, Saturday and Sunday 12:00-14:30 and 15:30-19:30. From 1 October: Wednesday to Friday 10:00-13:30 and 14:30-17:30, Saturday 12:00-14:30 and 15:30-19:30, Sunday 11:00-14:30 and 15:30-18:30; the October timetable covers Wednesday to Sunday only. These times are the visiting sessions; the tower itself closes half an hour after the second session ends, at 18:00, 19:00, 20:00 or 21:00 depending on the day, according to its website. Turn up on a Wednesday at 14:00 and you will find the door shut. There is a guided tour on Saturdays at 15:30, and for this exhibition it is the best slot, because these objects ask more of a visitor than the view from the terrace does.

Do not leave it until November. The show closes on 31 October together with the tower’s tourist season, not a week or two later.

English on site: unknown, and we will not guess. The KUL Museum publishes nothing about this show in English, and the Trinity Tower’s own website, checked on 23 September 2026, is in Polish only and mentions no English captions, audio guide or English-language tours on its exhibition, visiting or group-offer pages. Write to trynitarska@diecezja.lublin.pl or call +48 695 475 152 before you go if you need English. The essay-heavy captions are the part a non-Polish speaker will miss; the sculpture carries itself.

Current hours and prices are confirmed on the Trinity Tower website , the exhibition text on the KUL Museum website - note that the museum’s Polish text is spread over three sub-pages of one post, and the object descriptions and the curatorial essay sit on the second and third.

Who it is for: anyone who likes early sculpture and does not need touchscreens, and anyone already climbing the tower for the panorama who would like something more than stairs on the way up. Who will be disappointed: anyone expecting a large, spectacular show; this is a dozen or so objects in one room. Who should skip it entirely: wheelchair users and anyone who cannot manage steep stairs. The tower has no lift and no step-free access.

What the press says

Three pieces in the Lublin press, all favourable, and none of them an art-critical review: two news reports and one interview. No English-language coverage was found.

• Radio Lublin (2 May 2026, MLJ / ed. ToMa): a report from the tower’s season opening, with audio in which co-curator Mateusz Wszelaki explains what a Gothic altar cabinet was for - article and photographs , in Polish.
• Dziennik Wschodni (17 May 2026, Waldemar Sulisz): an interview with Anna Szlązak-Nowak that walks through the show object by object and explains how a Lublin university ended up with Silesian Gothic sculpture - interview , in Polish.
• Gość Niedzielny Lublin (5 September 2026, Małgorzata Oroń): an autumn guide to the tower that names “Holy Dialogue” as one of the main reasons to visit this season - article , in Polish.

Anna Szlązak-Nowak, curator at the KUL Museum, to Dziennik Wschodni on 17 May 2026, in our translation from the Polish: “This exhibition is of course an intimate one, barely a fragment of what we hold in the collection.”

See also

• Trinity Tower - the venue: the archdiocese’s permanent display of sacred sculpture, Lublin’s highest viewpoint and a cafe 40 metres up.
• KUL Museum - the collection’s owner, closed for renovation; the profile tracks where else its works are being shown.
• The Time of the Samurai - a Lublin temporary show at Lublin Castle that closes on 27 September 2026; the weekend of 26-27 September is the last chance to see both.

Venue profile: Trinity Tower .