Zprávy památkové péče 2017, 77(1-2):87-98

Types of rural churches in the 17th century

Rostislav Švácha

Ústav dějin umění AV ČR, v. v. i.

The article focuses on the differences between urban and rural sacral architecture in Bohemia and Moravia between the end of the Thirty Years' War and the 1690's. It begins with the simple assumption that the authors of churches in cities, important pilgrimage sites, and in large monasteries solved tasks of a different nature than authors of churches for villages and rural towns. Churches in the countryside were used by smaller Christian communities than churches in cities, they had a simpler liturgical operation, they did not put as much emphasis on the representation of their builders and patrons as did shrines in busy and frequently visited places, and as a rule were therefore not very expensive buildings. For churches in villages and towns built within this range, the article attempts to define their basic types using nine examples.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the attitude of architectural historians towards rural buildings was shaped by the idea of the Baroque as something formally diverse and rich. The architecture of rural churches from this range thus seemed to be stereotypical, poor, or at least excessively modest, resulting in no Czech researcher showing a special interest in it. This normative view of 17th-century rural sacral buildings was first overcome by studies from the last thirty years. The temperance of buildings from the late 16th and early decades of the 17th century began to be seen by architectural historians as a manifestation that follows its own ideals of good architecture and which corresponds to the demands of the Catholic Church and aristocracy after the Trident Council. This new view of rural architecture also brought about the concept of the building task (Bauaufgabe), brought to the debate on the Baroque by Hellmut Lorenz and Jiří Kroupa. The poverty and temperance of rural 17th-century churches is not, from a task point of view, the result of a "rusticalization" that occurs when stimuli from the center begin to accept less developed peripheral and provincial environments. Architects who received tasks in the countryside, as well as their clients, went on the assumption that such moderate formal resources were adequate for their place in the village or town.
Rural churches in Bohemia and Moravia from the 17th century are mostly longitudinal and barrel vaulted. In order to solve the structural problems of the vaulted church, the architects used types. When using types, the countryside is different from the city. Nowhere in the Bohemian and Moravian countryside does the Il GesĚ Roman church type appear, its stability provided by the lateral walls of the side chapels and the abutments (contraforts) above them. This type was well suited to the complex liturgical operation of churches in the cities and to the needs of the representation of their aristocratic and patrician users. However, rural Catholic communities preferred different types. Almost without exception, churches in the countryside used construction systems drawn into the center of the structure.
In the period from 1648 to 1690, the construction systems of churches in Bohemia and Moravia can be divided into three types: 1. hall with wall pillars (Černíkovice, Žitenice); 2. hall with pilasters (Rokytnice, Hořovice, Tuklaty); 3. emporium hall (Zahořany, Bystřice u Benešova, Popovice u Jičína, Trpín). More types were evidently not used in the Czech countryside in the 17th century. It was only from the eighties that single-nave types with a short transept began to be added, examples of which include the church in Horní Jiřetín by Jean Baptiste Mathey and the churches of Domenico Martinelli designed for the Moravian estates of Kaunitz and Liechtenstein.

Keywords: rural churches, 18th century architecture, typology of sacral architecture, Bohemia and Moravia

Published: March 1, 2017  Show citation