| Abstrakt: |
This article focuses on the murals on the southern walls of the chancel in the Kadaň monastery church. It attempts to analyse them as to their function as part of the transformation of the iconography and typology of donor scenes over time and the role of the image in a sepulchral context. It identifies the two depictions of founder Jan Hasištejnsky of Lobkovice and his wife in passion scenes, which means the murals were probably created shortly before 1517. Below this, Jan's son Jaroslav, his wife, and his two sons can be identified in a votive scene from the period between 1512-1517 on the basis of a detailed analysis. Jan Hasištejnsky, at the time an elder man preoccupied with eschatological matters, probably helped conceive the decorations and furnishings of the Lobkovice necropolis along with his son Jaroslav, who was taking over the domain and began work to preserve it. The complicated concept behind the murals attempts to combine many demands and functions in relation to a number of time periods and a range of recipients: 1) the current level - the depiction of Jaroslav's family and the monastery, their personal representation; 2) the future function - visualisation of the deceased within the soul memoria as a compliment to the bodies buried there; 3) the depiction of the deceased in direct contact with the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ as mediums of transcendental communication between the living and God, an example of active piety and the foundation for self-projection and eschatological hope; 4) the familial representation, confirming the foundational rights to the monastery for two generations of Jan Hasištejnsky's descendants, as well as collateral rights to the city, the visualisation of aristocratic status, familial tradition, and the virtue of the family's members. Models from Saxon Elector Frederick III the Wise are reflected in the iconography and typology of the murals, as his court painter Lucas Cranach the Elder and artists from his workshop of came to Kadaň and embarked together on the journey to the Holy Land with Jan Hasištejnsky. Frederick and other clients of the Cranach workshop used various methods of presenting their participation in sacred works at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries: the "devotional" mode; the "passive witness to sacred events" mode; and the "sacred identification portrait" mode (the donor played a role in the subject of the image). The analysis of the Kadaň murals showed that the concept went beyond the simple use and combination of existing conventions of depicting a donor and the imitation of the aforementioned cultural examples, but demonstrate an active composition and a conscious anticipation of the various functions of the images, and an overall structured strategy. This case clearly shows that the function we attribute to the images may not have been seen as an essential, unchanging value from the beginning, but was intentionally left open to transformational changes in time, perspective, and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
