This residual character also marks the installation of the exhibition. While most museums of Czechia, including those of the irresistible tourist magnet of Český Krumlov, have been refashioned with exciting modern concepts in recent years, the collection of the Regional Museum has the air of a local history museum of an insignificant small town furnished at the beginning of the 20th century. Items collected from here and there, in thematic groupings, with minimal accompanying text and without a comprehensive concept. Among them, some very interesting pieces, which, after all, make it worth visiting the exhibition: a large 1:200 ceramic model of Český Krumlov – then still Krumau – from 1820, the complete furnishing of the Baroque Jesuit pharmacy (with its entrance so unfortunately blocked by a cordon that you cannot see the side shelves), as well as some beautiful Baroque carvings and furniture.
But above all, eleven late Gothic wooden sculptures that had come from German churches in the region to the German city museum, and then from there to here.
The statues stand in the corridor, on posts between the windows, as if lined up in front of the columns of a Gothic church nave. This type of installation does not particularly focus on them, it only predestines them for a side glance while passing through the main nave – in contrast, for example, to the medieval sculptures of the Monastery Museum in the same Český Krumlov, which are exhibited as focused objects in the center of the rooms of the former Minorite monastery.
These sculptures were created between 1400 and 1520 in various workshops and in various styles, from the fashionable International Gothic of the royal courts to the more rustic South German and local styles. It is this period, from the early 1400s, that Krumau becomes an art producer from a mere art importer. The Rosenberg family ruling the region – “the Land of the Rose” – had a large number of Gothic churches, monasteries and places of pilgrimage built, whose provision with altars and statues gave a market and impetus to local workshops and itinerant artists from the surrounding regions, from Prague to the southern German cities. In addition, the Rosenbergs who ruled South Bohemia almost as kings, were much better able to stand in the way of the Hussites destroying the altars than the Czech king was on his estates.
The boom and the diversity and quality of these workshops are also shown by the eleven sculptures that found their way into this collection (more precisely, seven individual sculptures and two sculpture pairs). Nevertheless, the exhibition offers no information about them other than their origin and estimated time of creation. And there is no such comprehensive literature about the medieval sculpture of the region like the excellent catalog Obrazy krásy a spásy. Gotika v jihozápadních Čechách, published in 2013 about the Czech region that lies to the west of here, from Strakonice to Klatovy. If the visitor is captivated by the suggestiveness of these statues, he must research for himself at least some historical and artistic background information about the towns where the statues originally stood, their iconography and their parallels in other collections – in Český Krumlov, České Budějovice, Hluboká nad Vltavou, the National Gallery of Prague and elsewhere. All this information could be resarched, collated and published by local art historians in a beautiful and thorough album like Obrazy krásy a spásy. Český Krumlov’s yearly two million visitors would provide an ample market for it.
The town from where a statue entered the museum does not say much about its origin. A medieval wooden sculpture may have been made in the workshop of any city where the customer saw fit to order it. Even in Český Krumlov itself, where several workshops operated around 1450, and rural churches often ordered from them. But it is quite likely that the place from which it entered the museum, there it was preserved and revered for a long time, and it shared a common history with other statues, pictures, cults, pilgrimages, and prints made for pilgrims. If it was revered by a large number of believers who even attributed miracles to it, it could take the name of the place, e.g. the Holy Virgin of Unterwuldau. About this statue we do not know anything like this. However, it is certain that there is only one place in Unterwuldau where it could have stood: in the church of St. Leonard, founded in 1355.
Saint Leonard of Limousin lived in the court of the Frankish king Clovis I, and in 496 he converted to Christianity together with said king. Later he became a hermit, and finally the abbot of the monastery that he founded. His veneration was widespread in France and in Germany in the Middle Ages. He was invoked mostly for the release of prisoners, for problem-free birth and for the health of livestock. He had relatively few churches on Czech soil, thus Unterwuldau became an important pilgrimage church of his. In front of the altar there was a special bench, the “ox bench”, on which the peasants sat down to ask for the intervention of the saint for the healing of their animals or for the successful sale of them. Little cast iron animals were also sold in the church for 2-3 kreuzers, which they offered to the saint in representation of the animal to be cured or sold. Later, the pilgrims borrowed such cast iron animal figurines from a niche recessed into the wall of the sanctuary, they walked around the altar with them, prayed for the health of their animals, threw some change in the box and then returned the figurines to where they had been taken.
A statue of Saint Leonard from around 1500 is also preserved in the collection, with the designation of origin as “Český Krumlov area”. It very likely also comes from the church of Untermoldau. He holds untied shackles in the hand, as he had the right to free the prisoners he visited by the grace of the Frankish king, which is why he became the intercessory patron saint of prisoner release.
The church and the village, as you can see on the above postcard, were quite at the level of the Vltava, so they were swallowed up by the Lipno reservoir in 1958, along with many other villages. Its original German inhabitants had already been evicted twelve years earlier, the villages were empty, so there seemed no obstacle to their clearing. The church was intended for a while to be preserved as a munument, but then the reservoir management bought it for 89,957 koruny (from whom?), and they blew it up in May 1958. By comparing the map of the Third Hapsburg Military Survey (1869-1887) with the current state on Mapire.eu, you can see how little is left of the village: the few houses on its upper edge, which today are organized by the Vltava ferry into one community and the promoters of the Dolní Vltavice lives! movement. The church of St. Leonard, marked in red on the old map, now rests in ruins under the water.
In addition to the Krumau Pietà, one more wooden sculpture from St. Leonard’s Church testifies, with its high quality, to what a prestigious place the church must have been. This is a bust of a female saint, which is now preserved in the Aleš Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou. The image of the young woman with a dreamy look and braided hair was probably made in the Parler workshop in Prague around 1380-90. Two similar reliquary statues were purchased by the Düsseldorf gallery in 1934 with the mark “from Untermoldau”. I should have a look at them. And some of the cast iron animal figurines are said to have found a home in the Nové Hrady / Gratzen museum: I should visit them, too.
But what is a Pietà? The word itself means “compassion”. As a visual genre, it is a pictorial formula that belongs to the medieval Andachtsbilds or Andachtsbilder. The Andachtsbild was a typical and prominent pictorial genre of the late Middle Ages. Almost all of the sculptures in Český Krumlov belong to this type.
This term, developed by German art historians in the 1920s and 1930s, denotes such religious images which, although coming from biblical stories, are not illustration, but rather extremely concentrated summaries and emblems of them. These images – such as Jesus standing in his sarcophagus and showing the traces and instruments of His suffering, the Man of Sorrows, Christ hanging from the cross crowned and in royal clothes, the severed head of St. John the Baptist on a tray, the Pietà itself and many another – originated in medieval monasteries and spread from there as means of focusing meditation and prayer and promoting emotional identification.
The Pietà can be considered as that moment of Christ’s descent from the cross, when the dead Jesus is placed in the lap of his mother. However, this moment is apocryphal, since it is not mentioned in the Gospels. In fact, it comes from the expanded medieval versions of the Passion story, which have been performed in the Mediterranean regions on Good Friday evening, when Christ taken down from the cross is held in front of his mother or placed on her lap, and she sings over him the Lamentation of the Virgin, which is also the oldest surviving poem in Hungarian. This liturgical scene was also included in the representations of the Descent from the Cross, where the Virgin Mary embraces the corpse of Christ. From there, it is only a step away from what we see in Rogier van der Weyden’s Pietà, where everyone else disappears, leaving only Mary embracing the descending Jesus, with the crucifix rising in the background.
The Pietà is therefore a symbolic representation: not an illustration of a historical moment, but the condensation and emotional climax of the story. An emblematic image which, through the contrast of the postures and facial expressions of the two characters, visualizes with an extraordinary emotional power their intimate relationship and her grief and pain, so that the viewer or worshiper could also feel it and thereby come closer to Christ, or as we would say today, could experience a catharsis.
The Virgin of the statue from Untermoldau rises as a magna mater, at a later point of the mourning process. She is only bending a little over the corpse, and looking with her dry eyes not at it, but straight ahead, towards the viewer, as if to say: “do you see what they have done to Him?” The corpse collapses on her lap almost like a rag doll, this impression being also reinforced by the clumsily carved thin legs.
In another Pietà from around 1400 of the Český Krumlov collection, brought in from the city, the much younger Mary bends over her son’s body with a pained face, as if wiping it with a cloth. This Andachtsbild invites the viewer to feel and sympathize with her intense pain.
This image type comes from the idea that Jesus presented himself as a sacrifice on the cross, and this sacrifice ascended to the Father just like the animal sacrifices presented by the Jews to the Eternal One. In the Catholic Mass it is still recited after the Transsubstantiation:
“We ask you, almighty God, command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty…”
And the Father presents the accepted sacrifice before mankind redeemed by this sacrifice. As St. Paul writes in Romans 3:25:
“God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement – which we receive in faith – to demonstrate his righteousness.”
This image type is thus first of all a testimony to the believer about the authenticity of the redemption through Christ’s death on the cross. At the same, since two divine persons were already present on it, therefore with the addition of the Holy Spirit – who, according to Catholic theology, comes from the Father and the Son, as it were their embodied communication – it also became a common representation of the Holy Trinity. In its earliest versions – starting with the Cambrai Missal of 1120 – the Father holds Christ hanging on the cross, but from the 14th century, He increasingly shows the tormented and lifeless body of Christ, thereby encouraging the same emotional identification and compassion like the Pietà.
Incidentally, this will be the formula with which Masaccio, between 1426 and 1428, lays the foundations of Renaissance painting on the Holy Trinity altar of Florence’s Santa Maria Novella, as I have already written in detail.
It is anachronistic to see this kind of psychologization in medieval sculptures which perhaps only appeared with Messerschmidt in the 18th century. But seeing the rigid, almost insane gaze of the Father in the Buchen sculpture, recalling Repin’s Ivan the Terrible, one cannot shake off the heretical thought that “if this is what the law – which I created – demanded, then it had to be this way.”
The counterpart of the Father presenting His son to mankind is the Mother who presents her son held in her arms.
We might think that the Madonna holding her child was abstracted from the Nativity scene in Bethlehem, but no, not at all. The origin of this image type is completely different. It originates from Hellenized Egypt, the homeland of Christian icons, where the Hellenized forms of ancient Egyptian formulas began to assume Christian meanings. In this way, among others, Isis holding the child Horus was reinterpreted as Mary holding Christ in her arms.
But even the fully Christianized figure was then adapted not to the Nativity story, but to another narrative, which interpreted it in a cosmic dimension: that of the woman clothed in the sun from the Book of Revelation, who gives birth to her son despite of the threat of the dragon and protected by angels. The standing Madonnas almost always wear crowns, staning upon the Moon, and the Sun shines around them. And the Child on their arm is only apparently a child. He is in fact already an adult, which is often emphasized by his posture and face, who has already overcome the death on the cross and the resurrection, and is now the lord and sustainer of the universe, as shown by the apple in his hand.
This Child with the Madonna from Krumau is rather ambivalent. The Madonna does not hold Jesus in her arms, but slightly pushes Him away from her, almost into our face: look, this is what I did for you, and this is what you did to Him. With the same gesture as the corpse of Christ is held before the believers after the liturgical Descent from the Cross. This is, in fact, a hidden Pietà (just as the Pietà is a hidden Madonna with the Child), as well as a hidden symbol of the Eucharist. The naive, vernacular realization of the statue reinforces its absurdity, but this type also has more elegant Bohemian representatives:
Such an elegantly realized Madonna is the best-known Krumau sculpture of the period, the Krumau Madonna made in 1393, now kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The statue’s graceful posture, S-line, and delicate folds of clothing all follow the formula of the so-called “beautiful Madonnas” of International Gothic, which originated in French courtly art, reached the Prague court through the international relations of the Bohemian Luxembourg dynasty and spread from there throughout Bohemia.
This formula is also followed by another Madonna in the Český Krumlov collection. The right side of the wooden statue is missing, but its posture suggests that it once carried the child Jesus, just like its International Gothic counterparts.
The next Andachtsbild from Český Krumlov expands this couple into a trio. This is the formula of “St. Anne Trinitaire / St. Anna Selbdritt / Mettercia” or “Virgin and Child with Saint Anne”, where the Madonna and child Jesus are joined by Mary’s mother, Saint Anne, as a kind grandmother.
The origin of this type is very interesting and tortuous. The Bible does not mention Mary’s parents at all. However, the Jewish and Greek traditions of the Middle East both demanded to know the childhood and ancestry of the heroes, including Jesus and his mother, Mary. This demand was met by an apocrypha, the Protoevangelium Jacobi, attributed to the apostle St. James. As the name suggests, this book recounts the precedents of the Gospel, how Mary’s fictive parents Joachim and Anne longed for a child, how God fulfilled their request with a girl, and how they decided to dedicate this child to God, so that she weaves the red color (= the human thread of Christ) into the carpet of the Temple. This is why Mary is mostly weaving in the Annunciation pictures. This story of course copies that of Hannah from the Old Testament, who also conceived the prophet Samuel in her old age, after much begging, and who also dedicated her son to the service of the Temple.
This apocrypha was long known only in the Christian East, as were depictions of Saint Anne and her daughter, which followed another common mother-daughter image, the double portrait of Demeter and Persephone (here below from the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki). In the West, we only know one early representation of it, the once highly revered fresco icon in the Santa Maria Antiqua church of the Roman Forum, which belongs to the 6th-century Byzantine layer of the church, and which was buried for a thousand years by a 9th-century landslide, so that it had no followers.
This apocrypha and its pictorial representations, like so many other Eastern Christian legends and images – like the figure of St. George the dragon-slayer – were transferred to Western Europe during the Crusades. An excerpt of the Protoevangelium was included by Jacobus de Voragine in the standard collection of saints’ legends, the Legenda Aurea compiled around 1260, which made it so popular that Giotto, for example, was able to paint from it the story of Joachim and Anne in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel just fifty years later. The story did not cease to expand. In later versions, the widowed Anne got two more husbands, and this is how by the late Middle Ages an extensive kinship of Jesus was produced, which, in addition to St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist, also included five apostles and one disciple.
In the West, the double portrait of Anne and Mary was soon enlarged with the child Jesus, as the ultimate goal and meaning of the entire lineage. At first, this resulted in images where the child Jesus already joins the still-child Mary. Although this representation does not harmonize the ages of the characters, its symbolic meaning is all the more powerful, by showing the human descent of Jesus, and at the same time illustrating that God achieves His goals through miracles, but also counting on human cooperation.
But soon Anne was aged, Mary was depicted as a young mother, and thus the image took on a more realistic form.
Although these two pairs are no Andachtsbilder, nevertheless they carry some additional symbolic meaning beyond the mere representation of two saints. We know that the Catholic church celebrates St. Peter and St. Paul on the same day, June 29. The reason is that, according to tradition, they were martyred in Rome on the same day. It may even be true. But the real reason is rather that the Roman church has considered them both as its founders. Nowadays we only think so of St. Peter resting in the Vatican, but early medieval Roman tradition held that while St. Peter converted the Oriental – Jewish and Syriac – population of Rome, the Roman pagans were converted by St. Paul. This is why they were often depicted in double portraits, such as on the second oldest Christian mosaic in the apse of the Basilica of Santa Pudenziana (390), or on the St. Silvester cycle in the Santi Quattro Coronati, where Emperor Constantine recognizes in the double icon of St. Peter and Paul the two heavenly figures who had appeared him in a dream, promising healing if he converted to Christianity.
In this way, the two together do not merely represent two saints whose feast falls on the same day, but the founders of the most holy Roman Church, and thereby the primacy of this church.
The Andachtsbilder are the peak of medieval artistic symbolism, insofar as they present an important theological concept by capturing the essence of a biblical situation in a condensed manner, sometimes in an abstract, nearly absurd form, and they make it evident and easy to accept through emotional identification. Their wide penetration is shown by the extent to which they were used, for example, in the South Bohemian countryside, in village churches and monasteries around Krumau. And this penetration certainly contributed to the widespread strenghtening of symbolic and abstract thinking, on which the pictorial world of the Renaissance, Baroque and later periods could build.
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