Milan Pavlík

Kaple sv. Bernarda (Malá kapitula) konventu v Plasech. Její význam pro zařazení díla Jana Blažeje Santiniho do kontextu české vrcholně barokní "pohybové" architektury

The community of Czech art historians, in agreement with the majority of European experts, currently holds the opinion that the author of this important collection of structures done in the (Guarinist) architecture of movement is the architect and builder Christoph Dientzenhofer. Few voices have been raised to point to the weaknesses of this finding. The article looks at the work of the architect Johann Blasius Santini in Plasy after 1705, when he evidently entered into the services of the Cistercian Abbot Eugen Tyttl. He designed a complex of cloister buildings including the monastery with the Chapel of St Bernard, known as the Small Chapter House. This remarkable central space has a presbytery that is marked out convexly by distended walls and concavely by a cambered altar wall. The 'Bohemian' vault over the space of the presbytery is marked out by arches turned convexly into the space. The hall of the 'Small Chapter House' with the presbytery was built very shortly after completion of work on the Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Mladotice, with a similarly 'dynamic' interior layout. (It had the same investor, Abbot Eugen Tyttl. The first record of payment to the architect Santini was in 1707, construction took place in 1708-1710, followed by construction of the monastery 'based on prepared plans', begun in 1710 by excavating along the foundation). The resulting structures draw on the basic principles of Baroque architecture of movement (concave and convex interior walls, s-shaped undulating sections of the façade, rounded oval recesses, the 'Bohemian caps' vault with four-degree ribs or with a star-shaped geometric motif, newly moulded cornices, etc.). Johann Blasius Santini's indisputable authorship of the Chapel of St Bernard (The Small Chapter House) of the Monastery in Plasy and the Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Mladotice restores the name of this architect among the names that have been proposed thus far as authors of some Guarinist structures that are today ascribed exclusively to Christoph Dientzenhofer.

 

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