Ondej Jakubek

The Baroque in Olmouc

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The Baroque in Olomouc Olomouc during the Baroque

Visual Arts and Culture of a Central-European City between 1620 and 1780
VON ONDEJ JAKUBEC (OLOMOUC)

From December 2, 2010 until March 27, 2011, the Olomouc Museum of Art organized the exhibition entitled simply Olomouc Baroque. Its goal was a comprehensive presentation of history, culture and especially the visual arts in the city of Olomouc in the 17th and 18th centuries. The exhibition faced the problem of defining the Olomouc Baroque. This expression is not a demonstration of local patriotism but rather a conscious attempt to look into the historical, social and cultural structures of a concrete spatially-defined phenomenon. The exhibition and its three accompanying publications1 presented the Olomouc baroque not as a regional phenomenon but as a spatial one, situated within the context of Central Europe. In our interpretation of baroque culture in Olomouc we were inspired by the spatial turn in contemporary methodological approaches.2 In the sense of a structurally-based relationship between time and space, this approach regards the spatial relations in the context of visual culture as transient and changeable. The key themes are: the national and ethnic identity of art; definition of artistic region, artistic center, border and periphery, and; the diffusion, reception and circulation of artistic forms. The exhibition aspired to present 17th and 18th century Olomouc as a specific center whose culture was a result of multiple influences and impulses. In the period of the early modern era (but not limited to it), this cultural exchange was extremely rich in Central Europe. Mediated by numerous agents, it ran along many crossroads and parallel routes. From this point of view, it is sometimes difficult to define the cultural space of Central Europe. The number of centers, borders and peripheries is so large and their interaction so complex that sometimes the particular regions and their centers seem to be metropolises and sometimes mere margins.3 For example, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann did not consider Olomouc an independent and important artistic metropolis, while local art historian Ji Kroupa sees it as one of the centers of baroque art in Central Europe.4 What was the cultural and artistic identity of Olomouc in the 17th and 18th centuries? Its character was formed by specific relations within the community where various actors played their respective roles. These special conditions stem from the historical and cultural circumstances of Olomouc, which was, next to Brno, the most important Moravian royal

city. The Olomouc Baroque presented the city not only as a background for artistic realizations but as a live actor that conditioned the specific cultural and artistic exchange and dynamic development of communicating structures on the fragile border between center and periphery. Especially in the sphere of visual culture, these two terms should not be perceived in their dualistic, antagonistic sense, but rather in the way for example Jn Bako suggests.5 This approach, which sees baroque Olomouc as a crossroads of lively communicating cultures, enables us to naturally smooth away the seeming discrepancy between genetic dependency and imported culture on the one side and the local tradition and artistic potential on the other. We can see Olomouc as the actual Central-European environment with a strong ability to receive, absorb, adapt and transform both outside impulses and local traditions. Yet, the beginning of the baroque era was not very favorable for Olomouc. In 1636 the Emperor Ferdinand III established a Moravian Regional Tribunal a regional government subjected to the emperor with a seat in Brno. In 1641 all the authorities moved to Brno for good. The previous equality of Olomouc and Brno as the two capitals ended and the loss of the actual importance was fatal for Olomouc, despite its title as Royal Capital of Moravia (knigliche Hauptstadt Mhrens), which the city held until the 20th century. The seizure of the city by the Swedish army under Marshall Lennart Torstensson in 1650 accelerated the decline. Further disasters followed: plague epidemics (1623, 16791680, 17131715) and fires, of which the one in 1709 was the most devastating. However, the city managed to overcome the consequences of all these catastrophes and build a Moravian metropolis through artistic and symbolic means rather than on political potential. The trauma from the loss of its prestigious position (Brno, unlike Olomouc developed dynamically from the 19th century on) exists even now, but Olomouc has started to build symbolic strategies to defend its priority status. The oldest baroque panorama of Olomouc from 1674 is a good example of such strategy. The city council probably commissioned it from Anton Martin Lublinsk, the founder of the local baroque painting tradition. Next to the topographic view itself, it shows a group of repoussoir figures: the god of the Morava river and three women personifi-

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cations of Moravian Markgravate, Goddess Minerva and St. Paula. This iconography represented Olomouc as a head of the Markgravate, the center of intellectual life, and as a religious metropolis with the seat of the bishopric. The Markgravate allegory holds the bishops coats of arms identifying the city with this prestigious institution. The development of the city was possible due to economic stability and the flourishing of crafts and commerce, but especially because of the unique and rich patrons, mainly the Olomouc bishops (archbishops since 1777) for whom Olomouc was still the centre of Moravian diocese. The city was primarily an ecclesiastical metropolis and the local baroque sprang out of the institutional church culture. There are numerous traces of ecclesiastical patronage in the city: the bishops palace, the canons residences, many convents with churches, the pilgrimage church and Premonstratensian residence on the Svat Kopeek, or the largest urban complex in Olomouc the Jesuit Academy that became an inseparable part of the urban catholic culture since the second half of the 16th century. Monuments of secular culture complement these church buildings: aristocratic palaces, burghers houses, remains of the large bastion fortress, the unique group of baroque fountains, and the monumental memorials the plague column and the honorary column of the Holy Trinity.

Church patronage shaped also the surroundings of Olomouc. Traces of baroque urbanism and landscaping have been preserved on the pilgrimage route between the city, the Hradisko Premonstratensian Monastery and the church on the Svat Kopeek. Olomoucs ecclesiastical milieu brought in a sophisticated court culture represented by the bishops, their residences, art collections and thoughtful patronage. Bishop Karl II Liechtenstein-Castelkorn (16651695) was a foundational figure for the Olomouc baroque. As a passionate patron and collector, he gave the city its early baroque features and put together one of the most interesting Central-European collections that included the works of Tizian, Holbein, Bassano, del Piombo or van Dyck. After him, there were other important persons on the bishops seat who stimulated local baroque culture, for example Wolfgang Hannibal of Schrattenbach, Jacob Ernst of Liechtenstein or Ferdinand Julius Troyer of Troyerstein. They employed and commissioned a large spectrum of artists from all around Europe. From the third quarter of the 17th century, the bishops managed to form a specific creative environment, in which mostly Italian, German and Austrian artists took part. The Olomouc metropolitan canons were also important patrons of the arts. They gathered ostentatious collections in their residences both in and outside of the city and their interests and commissions were not much different from

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The Baroque in Olmouc

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those of the secular aristocracy. It was from their aristocratic backgrounds that most of the canons brought their models of artistic patronage. The most active canons came from important families such as the Althans, Kaunitz, Liechtensteins, Dietrichsteins, Haugwitz, Thurns, etc. There still exists a whole compound of canons residences mostly from the turn of the 18th century in the city quarter called the Outer Ward, which was, since the middle ages a traditional church domain. The order of Premonstratensians created another epicenter of baroque culture in their monastery in Hradisko. Thanks to their stable economic background, they were able to build not only the large convent but also the pilgrimage Church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary on the Svat Kopeek nearby. Similar models of Premonstratensian monasteries with adjoining pilgrimage churches existed near other important Moravian royal cities: Zbrdovice near Brno with the church in Ktiny, and Louka near Znojmo with Lechovice pilgrimage church. The Hradisko abbots outlook was far more refined than that of the local environment. They commissioned high-quality artists, mostly from Italy and Vienna, such as architects G. P. Tencalla, D. Martinelli, Ch. A. Oedtl, L. S. Kaltner, sculptors A. Winterhalder and B. Fontana, stucco artists, and painters P. Troger and D. Gran. Premonstratensians also organized spectacular church festivities, for example the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the finding and coronation of the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary of the Svat Kopeek (1732) or the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the arrival of the Premonstratensians in Olomouc (1751). Hradisko became an extremely attractive cultural center comparable with similar monasteries such as Melk, Gttweig or Klosterneuburg, and largely contributed to Olomoucs status as one of the prominent artistic metropolises of Central Europe. By presenting these main social and patronal circles, our project attempted to grasp the specific essence of the local milieu within the long period between the end of mannerism and the ascent of the enlightenment. The years 1620 and 1780 that bracket the period covered by the exhibition, hold symbolical meaning. The battle of the White Mountain in 1620 is a traditional milestone of the end of the renaissance era; it anticipated a radical change of society and culture in the Czech lands in the following period of anti-reformation. In 1780, Joseph II ascended the throne and implemented his reforms. Again, the mentality of the society changed. The enlightenment era with the Theresian and Josephinian reforms forcefully ended the era of baroque artistic prosperity. It brought the liquidation of a great number of local monasteries, hospitals, their chapels, and other municipal churches, the abolishment of the Jesuit order and the diminishment of the role of the local university. All this caused the destruction of the basis for the baroque type of artistic patronage. The army received priority, which strengthened the status of the

city as an enclosed fortress; Olomouc found itself on an unavoidable decline towards provinciality. However, the city still managed to create a truly specific dialect of visual arts and culture in the period between the battle of the White Mountain and the enlightenment, which justifies using the term Olomouc baroque. On the one side, the Olomouc baroque is a cultural phenomenon of European importance, on the other, it is an expression of local artistic tradition. Olomouc institutions employed cosmopolitan artists such as P. Troger. F. A. Palko and F. A. Maulbertsch. At the same time, J. K. Handke, a local and quite average painter, dominated the artistic scene. The extent of the pan-European and local dimensions of the Olomouc baroque is also apparent in the rich collections of local art patrons, where local and average artworks hang next to supreme examples of European art. This duality lies in the fact that Olomouc, as a specific epicenter of baroque culture, was both a center (within Moravian environment), which attracted artists from surrounding regions, and a periphery (from, for example, the Viennese, or today, transatlantic point of view). The exhibition and its catalogue, which gathered several hundred artworks, offer an extensive testimony of the milieu and the time, and capture the multi-layered character of the baroque art in Olomouc. The exhibition confirmed the

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importance of the local artistic lineage, represented by painters A. Lublinsk, A. Richter or sculptors J. Sturmer, J. M. Scherhauf, and J. Kammereit. The attractive and creative local environment provided background for artists of European importance, such as sculptors A. Zahner and F. Sattler or painter J. I. Sadler. The preserved buildings by important European architects present a wide spectrum of forms from early baroque, dependent on North-Italian mannerist resources, through the Danube-style high baroque, to the late baroque realizations influenced by French architecture. There is also interesting, but lesser-known, work of local architects whose designs from the 1750s were among the important discoveries of this exhibition. Another such discovery was a unique painting by P. Troger St. Peter with Simon the Magus, which the Hradisko Premonstratensians commissioned, together with its pendant, St. Paul, for their convent. After more then two hundred years, historian T. Vale found the two canvases in a small South-Moravian church. It was not only the artists who formed the local baroque visual culture but also the key institutions of Olomouc baroque whose representatives initiated numerous building projects, artistic commissions and cultural events. Like the artists, these art patrons and collectors encompassed both the local dimension and the wider European outlook, influenced by their origin and life experience. (For example, the Olomouc bishops and canons had close ties to Salzburg.) Thanks to a complicated web of contacts and cultural and artistic connections, the Olomouc patrons of the arts created an exceptional breeding ground for the development of a unique baroque metropolis. Even though Brno gained political supremacy over Olomouc in this period, in terms of symbolic capital and artistic potential the latter held its leading position. The goal of the exhibition and its accompanying publications was not only to present the visual forms of the Olomouc baroque but also to indicate the complexity of 17th and 18th century Olomouc and define what factors influenced the form and typology of artistic commissions. The project followed and presented the patronal circles and their inter-

connection, revealed the semantic background of the particular commissions and for the first time put the artistic realizations into their cultural-historical context, emphasizing not only the artists and their works but also their background, the patrons and their motivations. In this sense, we could present Olomouc as an original baroque metropolis, for which the period of economic prosperity and stability meant an extraordinary artistic expansion and penetration into wider Central-European cultural structures. The traces of this expansion are still visible in the city: Olomouc owes its main features to the baroque era.

Notes 1 Martin Elbel Ondej Jakubec (ed.): Olomouck baroko I. Promny ambic jednoho msta [Olomouc Baroque. A Citys Ambitions Transformed]. Olomouc 2010; Ondej Jakubec Marek Pertka: Olomouck baroko. Vtvarn kultura let 16201780 [Olomouc Baroque. Visual Arts 16201780]. Exhibition catalogue. Olomouc 2010; Ondej Jakubec Marek Pertka: Olomouck baroko. Historie a kultura. [Olomouc Baroque. History and Culture] Olomouc 2011. As these publications contain English summaries and bibliography, I will not give detailed references in this text. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and Western Modernism. London 2003; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago London 2004; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann Elizabeth Pilliod (ed.): Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art. London 2005. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago London 2004, pp. 145146; Mria Orikov, Rewriting History, Re-drawing Maps: Central Europe in the Global Story of Art. Ars 40, 2007, . 2, pp. 279285. Ji Kroupa: Olomouc. In: Jane Turner (ed.): The Dictionary of Art XXIII. London 1995, p. 425. Jn Bako: Perifria a symbolick skok [Periphery and Symbolic Leap]. Bratislava 2000, see pp. 169192.

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