engleski

Miniatures in the Missals of the Bishop of Zagreb George of Topusko

The miniatures from the two missals presented in this monograph, the commission of which is commonly associated with the liturgical and cultural interests of the Auxiliary Bishop of Zagreb, George of Topusko, are considered among the most valuable works of this kind in the Croatian art heritage. These include the missal today housed at the Treasury of the Zagreb Cathedral (call number K 2) and the missal kept at the Library of the Zagreb Archdiocese - the Metropolitan Library (call number MR 170). The main parts of both missals were illuminated in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The missal from the Metropolitan Library contains as well some illuminations from the late 17th century, the time of Bishop Aleksandar Mikulić, who had the missal from the Cathedral Treasury bound in a resplendent silver cover with gilt reliefs.This study on the miniatures from these exemplary liturgical books (including the antiphonary MR 10, housed at the Metropolitan Library) reinterprets the oeuvre of a Late Gothic illuminator, who worked for two Zagreb bishops: Osvald Thuz and his Auxiliary Bishop, George of Topusko. The identification of the Late Gothic miniaturist as a German artist working in Zagreb at the time, Hans Al[e]manus, proposed by Dragutin Kniewald, did not prove convincing enough. This miniaturist is therefore in this monograph simply referred to as the Master of Bishop George, as this bishop was the one for whom he painted most of his illuminations. The Master of Bishop George cultivated a highly personal and recognisable style, which can only to some extent be related to Central European "illumination schools". His distinctive trait was that he made ample use of the German and Dutch engravings of the period, from which he borrowed motifs for the miniatures in the missals of Bishop George.This study also reinterprets the second, Renaissance layer of miniatures in the missal from the Zagreb Cathedral Treasury and critically reviews the previous theses on the commissioner and the miniaturists. As the case usually is with medieval codices, despite some indications, the identities of the miniaturist and the specific commissioner have remained undetermined. The frequently recurring coat of arms motif indicates that the commissioner of the Renaissance miniatures was a member of the Bakócz-Erdödy family, but it cannot be determined whether this was Cardinal Thomas Bakócz or his nephew Simon Erdödy. The attempt to identify the miniaturist that the Hungarian scholars termed "Bakócz Monogrammist" has yielded no concrete results. In any case, it can be safely assumed that this person was not Giulio Clovio, a renowned miniaturist of Croatian origin, as some Croatian researchers claimed. However, the interpretation of the Renaissance miniatures reveals a semantic framework that completely differs from the one of the Late Gothic miniatures. In the Renaissance miniatures the medieval metaphors evoking a conflicting dualism are replaced by messages communicating the unequivocal bliss of souls devoted to faith in the spirit of humanism. The miniatures of the missal from the Treasury are therefore almost a textbook example of the combination of two world views and two stylistic and semantic paradigms: those of the Late Gothic and the Renaissance periods.

Miniatures, prints, bishop George of Topusko, Zagreb

Riječ je o engleskom izdanju knjige "Minijature u misalima zagrebačkog biskupa Jurja od Topuskog"