Zprávy památkové péče 2016, 76(4):371-378

Memento mori in the Kuks Hospital corridor

Jiří Šerých

Using a substantial contribution of EU money, the project Kuks - pomegranate managed to restore a hitherto unused and largely derelict part of the Kuks Baroque hospital and breathe new life into it by 2014. The task also included freeing the large mural "Dance of Death" from a lime overcoating, painted in the 1720's on the initiative of Count Franz Anton von Sporck, who took a special passion in cultivating the memento mori in all areas of art, from the family tomb under the hospital, through the literature he published on this topic at his own expense, to Braun's statues and numerous engravings. During the restoration of the mural cycle, it became increasingly confirmed that for the fifty scenes of the cycle, the templates of the famous woodcuts Bilder des Todes by Hans Holbein the younger were completely used by an unknown average-quality artist, sometimes more successfully, and sometimes with various compositional inadequacies. Another surprise was that the individual scenes of the representatives of human society led away by Death did not develop on the walls of the north corridor of the ground floor of Kuks Hospital in a passive order based on the "scenarios" of the Bon Repos book, but that the clergy, the nobility, and the lower classes were specially located from a longitudinal axis as defined by the hospital's Holy Trinity church.
Echoes of Holbein's woodcuts, however, had a considerable tradition in Czech art before the Kuks implementation. Replicas accompanied a book on preparing for a good death, written by Erasmus of Rotterdam and published in an early Czech translation by Jiří Melantrich, as early as 1563. One hundred years later, Holbein interpreted the etchings of Václav Hollar and finally, three decades after the creation of the Kuks frescoes, the known cycle Michael Heinrich Rentz came into being, albeit in a completely separate concept.
A sample confrontation of the Kuks frescoes with Holbein's engravings presented in our illustrated supplement allows readers to not only assess the painter's abilities, but also to engagingly confront the idea of how the artist managed to work with the miniature engravings of the Renaissance master if he was to realize them over an area of several meters. At the same time, however, the painter's thematic and compositional intentions are hinted at wherever, after the short term of the assigned task, the large team of variously skills restorers failed to sufficiently recover the paintings from the lime cover.

Keywords: Kuks; Dance of Death; Hans Holbein the younger; Baroque painting; restoration; iconography

Published: December 1, 2016  Show citation