|
The work belongs to the twenty-eight busts that decorated the former choir stalls of St. Martin's church in Pozsony (Bratislava). The stalls which replaced a series of Gothic choir stalls from 1497, were commissioned by Imre Esterházy, Prince-Archbishop of Hungary, and put into use on 5 November 1736, the feast day of St. Imre (Emeric).
These data, recorded by the chapter of St. Martin's, and published in 1880, are the only ones about the construction of the stalls. Hitherto no other archivalia had been found. Thus we know nothing about the wood-carvers and joiners who took part in implementing the work. Only a pen and washed drawing of the sacristy, made in 1848 by the Viennese painter Franz Alt - sold by auction at the Viennese Dorotheum in 1970, and since then disappeared - gave some notion of the former and layout of the stalls. A copy of the drawing, made by József Csákós at the beginning of the 20th century, can be found in the Bratislava Mestské múzeum.
In the course of the purist restoration of the church, carried out in the sixties of the 19th century, the Baroque stalls were removed and replaced by Neo-Gothic ones. The former stalls go to Vienna, in the then Palais Kinsky, while the busts were bought by the art collector Enea Lanfranconi. Some art literature, supported in 1929 even by Andor Pigler, still attributed them to Johann Messerschmidt. However, in 1893 Albert Ilg realized their connection to Donner, and exposed nine of them at the Donner anniversary exhibition.
The busts got to Budapest at the beginning of the 20th century. The twenty-four pieces, that time bought by the Iparművészeti Múzeum, can actually be seen in the permanent exhibition of the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria. The other four busts got into private property. They appeared in 1943 at an auction in Budapest, but later disappeared.
The firs art historian who investigated the details of the problem was Mária Aggházy. She also attributed them to Donner's workshop. In view of stylistic considerations, she considered that it had been primarily Jacob Schletterer and Franz Kohl who, on the basis of Donner's designs, had executed the busts. In our opinion there were more - six or seven - wood-carvers who took part in this work. Probably they didn't all belong to Donner's workshop; there could have been some independent, local masters as well, who carried out some busts commissioned by Donner . Among Donner's assitants not only Kohl, but also Gottfried Fritsch and Ludwing Gode can be considered; but not Schletterer, who at that time was already working in Zwettl as an independent master. The iconographic programme was only partially unravelled by Mária Aggházy, and her explanation is still open to question in many respects. We don't know the original succession of the busts, even though engraved Roman numerals have been recently found at the bottom of some of them. These date probably from 1736 and might refer to the original layout of the stalls.
The exhibited female bust has no attributes that could make her identification possible. Aggházy considered her, as all the other female busts of the series, a Sybil, but it is possible that she represents a young female saint. The figure recurs several times in Donner's "oeuvre". It is closely related to the figure of Mary Magdalen in the reliefs "Consolation of Mary" and "Descent from the Cross". The distant manner of modelling may refer to Gode or Kohl as executive masters. At the bottom of the bust the Roman numeral IIII is engraved. Thus the work could originally have been the fourth piece of the series on the right or left side of the stalls. The circular socle was added certainly later, after the removal of the stalls.
|
