Zprávy památkové péče 2015, 75(5):403-412

Medieval wall paintings in the church in Potvorov in Plzeň. The role of art historians and preservationists in creating concepts of restoration

Petr Skalický

The article deals with the art-historical position of the meaning of the term restoration (or recovery), which is currently very overused in professional speech and confused for a formulation of intention. The concept, however, should rather express a deeper ideological basis that comes from the efforts of first learning about a work of art (heritage property) as much as possible. The author sees, as a vital contribution of an art historian in the formulation of a dialogue, the value classification of a property in the spirit of how it was presented by Alois Riegl. At the same time, it would be inappropriate to mechanically apply Riegl's classification, something necessarily tied to a time more than a hundred years ago, without efforts at a contemporary revision accurately applied in today's context. One of the fundamental values a heritage property can be, for example, its function, which has been kept in its basic contours since its inception. In the case of sacred spaces, this function is necessarily associated with a liturgical content. The role of an art historian who possesses a methodological apparatus that may take these factors into account in thinking should be irreplaceable in the process of restoration. On the other hand, again, the education of an art restorer is irreplaceable, based on which (both interdisciplinarily and in dialogue) the established concept formulates its own plan and based on which the work is restored.
Considerations on the concept of restoration and on the value classification of a property unfold against the background of Romanesque and late Gothic frescoes in the church of St. Nicholas in Potvorov (dist. Plzeň-North). In professional literature, only paintings in the apse and one of the paintings in the stands have been published (and thus value accorded) as for the interior paintings. Researchers have completely overlooked (at the least), important from the heritage point of view, the ornamental paintings, remains of polychrome on the plaster and on stone elements, and even the figurative paintings of the pillar in the west tribunal altar. The remains of these paintings, however, originally formed a single image with the paintings in the apse that opened before the viewer in the space of the interior walls. An important factor in determining the concept of restoration in the case of Potvorov is also the preserved double layered figural paintings in the apse, where on the wall surfaces under the concha there are mixed Romanesque and Gothic paintings. Determining a concept should therefore be based on a detailed understanding of the material relationships between these layers, and also from the identification and interpretation of the relationship of these with the rest of the paintings in the interior of the church. The article therefore emphasizes the dialogic process in determining the concept of restoration and warns against a priori approaches to recovery.

Keywords: Potvorov (dist. Plzeň-North), concept of restoration, mural, medieval, sacred space, value of age, intentional heritage value

Published: December 1, 2015  Show citation