Martina Kovářová

Franz Ignaz Günther und sein Werk in Olmütz

The article focuses on carvings of the Resurrected Christ created in 1752–1753 by the top Bavarian rococo sculptor Franz Ignaz Günther (1725–1775) for the Church of Ss Maurice and Michael in Olomouc. Relatively little is known about this artist’s early work and the time he spent working in Moravia. In the mid-1950s Vilém Jůza attributed sculptural work on the main altar in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kopřivná in the Šumperk region to Günther, as a result of which the work of this artist quickly received the attention it warrants from Bavarian researchers, who wrote up hypotheses about why the artist went to Moravia. Two carvings newly attributed to him confirm the belief that in 1752–1753 Günther was employed in the workshop of Ondřej Zahner (1709–1752), a sculptor in Olomouc. At that time he was approached by the Žerotín-Lingenau family to create the sculptural decorations for the main altar of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kopřivná. e with the 16th international EIRÉNÉ conference in Prague.  The remarkable London drawings, which were first dealt with in the context of Bohemian art by Otto Pächt, were the subject of a study Josef Krása wrote in the early 1980s to accompany the publication of a facsimile of the manuscript. It was published in 1983 in English and German (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: A Manuscript in the British Library, New York, George Braziller, 1983; Die Reisen des Ritters John Mandeville, München, Prestel-Verlag, 1983). The text of the lecture is similar to an extent to his description of the illuminations in fol. 15r and 16r (The Travels, plate 19, 27).

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