Zprávy památkové péče 2019, 79(4):387-401 | DOI: 10.56112/zpp.2019.4.02

Are we really looking at the Middle Ages? The wall paintings in the Marian Tower in Karlštejn from the perspective of secondary restoration interventions

Petr Skalický¹, Adam Pokorný²

¹ NPÚ, GnŘ

² AVU

The medieval murals in the Church of the Virgin Mary and in the Chapel of St. Catherine in the Marian Tower at Karlštejn Castle are one of the pillars of the story of art history in the former lands of the Czech Crown and, at the least, in all of Central Europe. The most recent restoration survey, carried out in 2018 and 2019 with the objective of determining their current condition, has brought a number of new findings that have the potential to shift and correct existing interpretations in many ways. It turned out that the paintings and other artistic decorations in both sacral places were created in more or less two phases, the first of which was confined to the Chapel of St. Catherine, while the second and quite artistically homogeneous phase which, having undergone (sometimes radical) changes in its conception during its creation, took place both in the chapel and in the church. One of the most striking errors that has been repeated in literature is the conspicuous "Rudolphine" overpainting of the characters of the "Relic Scenes", which have recently been attributed to the so-called Master of the Luxembourg Family Tree, an anonymous artist from the later 14th century. The survey also verified the relevance of the testimonial value of copies of the scenes in the manuscripts of the Master of the Luxembourg Genealogy of Vienna and Prague, which were created between 1569-1573 and are probably the work of Matěj Ornys. It is therefore possible to apply the same relevance to the testimonies of the copies of the ancestors of Emperor Charles IV in manuscripts that have been the subject of controversy over the past decades in professional circles. The need to pay attention to secondary painter-restoration interventions in a historical work of art appears to be particularly important here. The effort to classify and interpret these interventions is necessary both for the actual restoration intervention (i.e. the material interpretation of the work), and for the artistic-historical non-invasive interpretation and classification as it indirectly participates in determining the concept of the restoration. The cooperation of art historian and conservationist together with an experienced restorer should thus be a prerequisite and a necessity. The first secondary artistic addition to the decoration is connected with the reconstruction of the Church of the Virgin Mary before 1597. At that time, there were probably two additions, as indicated by the two different technologies of overpainting, the higher quality of which was associated with the Relic Scenes, today with the hard-to-designate extent of the overpaintings of the Apocalypse with scenes from the Old and New Testaments. After some minor inputs, the purist endeavor to restore Karlštejn Castle as a whole, associated with architect Josef Mocker and his teacher Friedrich von Schmidt, was the decisive one for the time. In 1898, Josef Mocker entrusted painter Josef Heřman with the restoration of the paintings in the spirit of receding historicism. Due to the change in the socio-professional climate of the time, and the emphasis on preserving the historical work, its restoration aroused a number of controversies and was halted in 1901. A sharp revision in restoration occurred later in the 1920s with Maxmilián Duchek, paradoxically despite the efforts for a scientific and conservative intervention of older restorative approaches that were associated with significant overpainting (more creative, but unacceptable for their drawing approach). The fundamental conceptual shift in the approach to restoration is associated with Bohuslav Slánský, who worked there from the 1950s to 1970s and who at the time worked as a professor at the newly established restoration studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His intentions are now considered a founding approach to the historical material of the work of art, newly understood as a complicated layered structure and not as a work created and understood merely in overall terms; from this point we may view all other restorers who devoted themselves to the paintings afterwards (Raimund Ondráček, Jan Pasálek, Michal Tomek, Petr Bares with Jiri Brodsky). The effort to determine older restoration interventions (including materials and technologies used) plays a crucial role both in distinguishing them from the preserved fragment of the original historical work, but also in determining the optimal concept of future restoration findings and, ideally, to the related concept of the visual presentation as a whole. Consequently, the article also touches on the description of the current state of the decoration, as it relates to the covered artistic and restoration work, and recommendations for the direction regarding the importance of the paintings. The findings of the restoration should be taken out of their current commercial assignment, where the criterion for the selection of the restoration team is the lowest price rather than the quality and precision of the procedures and the future visual impression. Particularly with such important historical works of art, current practice, being the work of a rigid reading of the letter and not the spirit of the law, leads to the long-term degradation of the restoration profession and often to unsuitably established concepts of restoration. In conclusion, referring to the title of the article and in connection with the aforementioned, the authors point out that the human eye is usually subject to deception, in which, in addition to physiological factors, is fundamentally influenced by current (restoration as well as artistic-historical) interpretation. Paintings from the Middle Ages, which we often see as the "authentic" Middle Ages, have been preserved mostly in a different social, spiritual, and generally historical context as well as in an altered constructional context and only in fragments in their complex subtle layered structure.

Keywords: Karlštejn, Church of the Virgin Mary, Chapel of St. Catherine, medieval murals, history of restoration, concept of restoration intervention, Josef Heřman, Maximilián Duchek, Bohuslav Slánský, Relic Scenes

Published: December 1, 2019  Show citation