Nicholas of Flüe

Within a single continuous narrative Mehoffer divides the composition into three vertical zones, asymmetrical to one another. The lowest zone (the plinth and its adjacent band) holds the crowd of oath-takers, with the coats of arms of the cantons and a Latin / French inscription along the very bottom. The middle zone introduces two monumental personifications on tall columns: Libertas (Liberty) and Patria (Homeland), which dominate the crowd like spiritual signposts. The uppermost zone contains a transcendent theological axis: the separately placed letters Alpha (at the top of the left pair of lancets) and Omega (at the top of the right pair) against a turquoise-marine ground, scenes from the life of St Nicholas of Flüe in the background, and ornamental ‘cloud’ ribbons of an Art Nouveau rhythm.

Along the lower edge of the window runs a programmatic French inscription, divided into four segments matching the four lancets:

LA PAIX EST TOUJOURS EN DIEU PARCE QUE DIEU EST LA PAIX (“Peace is always in God, because God is peace.”)

Above the inscription are set ten coats of arms of the cantons taking part in the oath — in an Art Nouveau stylisation, of equal size and in an even rhythm. The arms are labelled in gold majuscule: URI, SCHWYTZ, UNTERWALDEN, LUCERNE, FRIBOURG, ZURICH, SOLEURE, BERNE, GLARIS, ZOUG; on the GLARIS shield a small figure of a monk with a crozier and a book is visible (St Fridolin — the emblem of the canton). The band of inscription plus arms functions as the community’s collective signature: it is not the signature of an individual donor, but a political manifesto of the whole Confederation.

The window’s palette is composed of three dominant tones: sapphire and deep blue (#0F2F8F / #2F6FD6) in the sky and the background passages; carmines, rubies (#B0002A / #C1121F) and golden yellows (#F2C94C) in the heraldry, the robes of the personifications and the narrative accents; greens and turquoises (#2E8B57 / #1FB7A6) in the landscape of Nicholas’s encampment in the background. Mehoffer introduces a violet accent (#4B2E83) in the details of the crowns of Libertas and Patria and in passages of the robes — a colour symbolically associated with dignity and spiritual meditation.

The most strongly Art Nouveau elements are: the undulating, ornamental ‘clouds’ and ribbons at the edges of the lancets (the classic whiplash line); the tendril ornament at the bases of the columns of Libertas and Patria; the rhythm of sapphire-and-gold stars in the sky of the crowning zone; the subtle patterned grounds of the allegories’ robes. The lead line guides the gestures of the oath-takers’ hands with masterly economy — this is expressionist graphic art, subordinated to the psychology of the scene.

Two monumental personifications stand on the tall pedestals of an ‘Altar of the Homeland’ — recalling the figural fountains of old Fribourg: Libertas (Liberty) and Patria (Homeland). Female figures, in long robes, with the canonical attributes of cantonal allegory: Libertas — with a Fribourg crown and an attribute alluding to a palm / banner; Patria — with the arms of the Swiss Confederation or the Canton of Fribourg and a staff. Scholarly tradition (Adamowicz 1982) identifies Jadwiga Mehofferowa, the artist’s wife, as the model who posed for Libertas, which gives the personification a personal, portrait-like specificity. This solution — inscribing the portrait of a private person into a monumental public allegory — is a typically modernist gesture (compare: Klimt, Beethovenfries 1902; Mucha, Slovanská epopej 1910–1928).

The uppermost part of the window contains two letters of the Greek alphabet — Alpha (Α) and Omega (Ω) — in a sky drawn apart. This inscription refers directly to Revelation 1:8: Ego sum Alpha et Omega, principium et finis (“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”). Combined with the lower motto La paix est toujours en Dieu, a clear theological axis is formed: peace is not a momentary political compromise, but a participation in the eternity of God, who is the beginning and the end of everything.

In the landscape background, in the right and left parts of the window, Mehoffer introduces miniature scenes from the life of St Nicholas: the solitary hermit absorbed in prayer, with hands joined (without a rosary and without a dog), in a green Alpine landscape with flowering shrubs (the right part of the window); and a figure in a habit with a long rosary ending in a cross in a scene of adoration on the left. These episodes, discreetly worked into the backgrounds, act as a contrapuntal narrative to the main collective oath scene. Nicholas of Flüe — patron of peace, mediator of the Tagsatzung at Stans in 1481, who by his spiritual intervention prevented the disintegration of the Confederation — appears here not as a scenario’s protagonist, but as a spiritual ‘source of stillness in the midst of the storm’.

In the canonical iconography of Bruder Klaus (Voragine does not include him, since he lived two hundred years later; the iconographic tradition takes shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and becomes canonical in the nineteenth and twentieth) Nicholas has the following attributes: a monastic robe (a ‘brown’ habit, a pilgrim’s cope), a rosary, a cross on the breast, and the ‘Meditationstuch’ (a meditation cloth with a concentric pattern of six rays issuing from a central point — the vision of the Trinity, c. 1473). Mehoffer respects the canon but handles it with discretion: Nicholas is not an ‘attribute-displayer’ here, but a person immersed in prayer. Nicholas was beatified in 1669 (Clement IX) and canonised only in 1947 (Pius XII) — so at the time Mehoffer’s window was made (1919) Nicholas was officially blessed, not a saint, which is reflected in the window’s title.

The choice of St Nicholas of Flüe as patron of the window is a politically and theologically balanced one. Nicholas was: a Catholic (acceptable to Catholic Fribourg); a Swiss (acceptable to the whole Confederation); a fifteenth-century patriot (that is, from before the Reformation wars that divided the confederates); and above all a mediator who by his spiritual intervention prevented the disintegration of the Confederation in 1481 (the Tagsatzung at Stans — the Catholic and Protestant cantons were close to rupture). His beatification in 1669, and then the movement for his canonisation developing in the nineteenth century, made Nicholas, in the first half of the twentieth century, the spiritual patron of Swiss national unity — something officially sealed with his canonisation in 1947 and his proclamation as patron of Switzerland.

The introduction into a cathedral window of two secular personifications — Libertas (Liberty) and Patria (Homeland) — is a programmatic gesture of exceptional iconological significance. Mehoffer brings secular national personifications (canonical in the republican art of the nineteenth century — Marianne in France, Italia turrita in Italy, Helvetia in Switzerland) into sacred space on an equal footing with figures of saints and of the Trinity. This gesture carries out a programme of a modern, Catholic patriotism, in which national values and religious values are not in opposition but in synthesis. In the context of the wartime and immediately pre-war pacifist Catholicism (Benedict XV, the encyclicals Ad beatissimi of 1914 and Pacem Dei of 1920), this solution has the standing of a manifesto of political theology.

The inscription La paix est toujours en Dieu parce que Dieu est la paix is a dense, programmatic theological statement. The quotation derives from the Augustinian tradition (pax est tranquillitas ordinis — “peace is the tranquillity of order”, De civitate Dei XIX,13), but in Mehoffer’s formulation it takes on a specifically twentieth-century radicalism: peace is not a political condition achieved by compromise, but a participation in God himself, who is peace (the identification of God with peace, not with its absence). In 1919, as the world emerges from four years of mass slaughter, this theological manifesto carries the sharpness of a critique of civilisation.

The identification of Jadwiga Mehofferowa, the artist’s wife, as the model who posed for Libertas (Adamowicz 1982) gives the window a personal biographical dimension. Jadwiga was not only the person portrayed — she was also Mehoffer’s spiritual mainstay in the wartime Kraków–Fribourg years, when the artist’s family experienced tragedy (the death of their son Zbigniew in 1907). Inscribing Jadwiga’s portrait as Libertas into a monumental public allegory is an intimate homage concealed within a patriotic gesture — an iconographic solution joining the personal and the political spheres, typical of the modernist intimacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

‘Nicholas of Flüe’ is also a work with an important Polish–Swiss dimension. Mehoffer, a Polish patriot who worked in an independence-minded Kraków under Austrian partition, in 1919 witnessed the reborn Second Polish Republic while at the same time constructing a monumental image of Swiss patriotism. This biographical-historical convergence gives the window the dimension of a universal reflection on national unity in the post-imperial age. ‘Libertas’ and ‘Patria’, painted in 1918/1919, may be read not only as Swiss allegories, but as a universal affirmation of national values in the year the states of Central Europe regained their independence.

Józef Mehoffer’s ‘Saint Nicholas of Flüe’ is a monument of European rank for three interlocking reasons. First — as a monumental realisation of a four-lancet composition stitched into a single panoramic scene, it is formally one of the most ambitious works of the whole Fribourg cycle. Second — as a programmatic pacifist-patriotic manifesto of 1919, it is a theological and political document of the First World War. Third — as a synthesis of secular national personifications (Libertas, Patria) and canonical hagiographic iconography (Nicholas of Flüe), it is a work iconologically unprecedented in the sacred art of its age. The gigapixel digital documentation, produced by the Foundation for the Virtualisation of National Cultural Heritage in 2025, makes possible for the first time a detailed analysis of the portrait specificity of the face of Libertas (Jadwiga Mehofferowa) and of the micro-details of the cantonal heraldry.