The
Fall. A relief by an unknown Tallinn
sculptor
Silver
chalice with flamboyant motif. Unknown Tallinn
master, late16th - early 17th c
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JÜri
Kuuskemaa: RENAISSANCE IN ESTONIA
Tallinn has given Europe only one artist whose work is
exhibited in such art museums as the Washington
Metropolitan, the Prado, the London National Gallery, the
Wien Kunsthistorische Galerie, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow,
and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Hague, Copenhagen and
Paris. The name of Michel Sittow is not known to everyone,
but in professional circles he is considered to be one of
the best portrait painters of the Dutch School at the end of
the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries.
Michel Sittow (1469-1525) stood at the border of the
Gothic and the Renaissance. He was born in Tallinn and
received his first instruction in art from his artist
father. He then moved on to Brugge, probably to the studio
of Hans Memling. The year 1490 witnessed the start of his
meteoric rise as a highly sought-after court artist in Spain
and Flanders. Master Michel's favourites were half-figure
portraits and pictures of the Madonna. He used to give
saints and the Virgin Mary the features of his clients. He
painted the Spanish Queen Isabella, the Duke of Burgundy,
Philip the Handsome, Margarete of Austria, the King of
Denmark Christian II and other sovereigns. The precision and
fineness of his brushwork, the bright colouring and the
material qualities of his subjects, place Master Michel
close to the top of Renaissance art.
In 1506 Michel Sittow returned to Tallinn, became a
citizen of the town and, towards the end of his life,
ascended to the position of the head of the St Canute Guild.
Unfortunately, his Tallinn period work has been sold abroad
or destroyed. Only four figures of saints on the altar of
the Passion of Christ in St Nicholas church are believed to
be his work. A figure of St George and a wooden relief of St
Andrew in Tallinn are allegedly the works of Sittow. The
tombstone of the Tallinn Town Doctor Johannes Balliv (1520)
in St Nicholas Church was also probably made according to
Master Michel's design.
Michel Sittow participated in the revolutionary
reformational events in Tallinn in 1524 which broke the
spine of Catholicism and medieval church art. The pillaging
of pictures in churches and monasteries occurred at the same
time.
Nevertheless, the secularisation of art, self-centered
attitudes, and the ousting of Gothic ornaments did not
nevertheless occur abruptly.
The economic boom during the Reformation in Old Livonia
(today's Estonia and Northern Latvia) produced a flurry of
construction. Numerous ancient buildings were modernised
according to the needs of developing military technology,
the altered fashion and religious beliefs. The importance of
sacral art diminished drastically, and the abandoned saints
were replaced by allegorical virtues and characters from
classical mythology.
The fortress architecture was held in high esteem. The
bastille type solid and low artillery towers, and earthworks
against cannons with increased gunpower, were erected in
front of the old walls of towns and fortresses.
The difficulties in transition from Gothic to Renaissance
can be clearly seen in the case of the Tallinn sculptor of
The Fall. That particular sculptor had produced three
monumental relief slabs depicting the scene of The Fall.
These have well-modelled faces and a tree, but the artist
had considerable difficulties in producing the anatomically
correct human naked bodies. He had obviously been used to
painting well buttoned-up ascetic gothic saints and was not
able to adapt to the demands of the new taste.
Post-Reformation sculpture exhibits a lot of clumsiness
in the style of figure and the old-fashioned jointing of
architectonics. The façades of the Tallinn houses
bore Gothic-like geometrical framing until the beginning of
the 17th century. The modern Renaissance shields in old
framings now carried family symbols and coats-of-arms and
even human figures. The level of execution varies from naive
popular art to an art worthy of any royal court.
The peaceful development was interrupted by the assault
of the Moscow grand duchy against territories of the
decrepit Livonian order in 1558. This was the start of the
25 year-long Livonian War which involved also Sweden, Poland
and Denmark. Before being divided between the three states
mentioned above, Old Livonia was thoroughly ravaged in the
war. Creative activities ceased and the larger part of
ancient architectural and art heritage was destroyed by
fire. The only town left unconquered and unpillaged was
Tallinn due to its extraordinarily strong fortifications.
Therefore a remarkable part of the earlier art heritage has
survived intact, unlike in other regions of Estonia where it
was destroyed in the Livonian War or in the Swedish-Polish
wars which soon followed (1600-29).
In the late 16th century, Tallinn showed the first signs
of recovering from the Livonian War. In 1589 the town got a
new master builder with special interest in sculpture. His
name was Arent Passer and he came from the Hague. His most
important work of sculpture, completed in 1595, was the
tombstone of Pontus de la Gardie, the Swedish army commander
of French extraction and his wife Sophia Gyllenhielma. The
monument was made by order of King Johan III, because Pontus
chased the army of Ivan the Terrible out of Estonia. And
besides, Sophia was the King's own illegitimate daughter.
Arent Passer carved a sarcophagus out of limestone. There
are high relief figures of the spouses on the cover and
their coats-of-arms on the front side, together with figures
of Death with lowered torches and a scene of the siege of
Narva which was the height of de la Gardie's military
career. Above the sarcophagus in the Tallinn Cathedral,
there is an epitaph on the wall depicting the resurrection
of Christ and some allegorical figures. In architectural
design, Arent Passer has derived inspiration from the
mannerism of the Netherlands; in his sculptures one can
detect the influence of Jean Goujon.
In a simplified form, Arent Passer repeated the de la
Gardie tombstone in Turku Cathedral in the tombstone of the
Swedish general Evert Horn (1616). The Horns, Uexküll,
Tiesenhausens and other nobility also had Passer design
impressive tombstones for their families, as well as figural
epitaphs in the Tallinn cathedral and other churches in
Estonia and Finland. The Kuressaare Museum holds the stone
altar reliefs of the Kärla church which were made in
Passer's workshop; the Estonian Maritime Museum has reliefs
with the Evangelists from St.Michael's monastery; and there
is a Passer epitaph above the Tallinn Holy Ghost Church
portal. Numerous houses of the nobility and the burgers can
boast window pillars, reliefs and chimney-stones from the
Passer workshop. They all have a similar treatment of
ornaments: roll-edged cartouches, festoons and mascharoni,
samples of which can be found in the work of Vredeman de
Vries and Cornelis Floris.
The best example of Passer's mannerist work that can be
seen in Tallinn's streets, is the façade of the
Blackhead Brotherhood's house (1597). Passer decorated the
earlier Gothic gabled houses with numerous flat reliefs, a
showy portal and a gable with ornamental volute. Although
Passer was inspired by the spirit of the Renaissance, he
maintained the old façade's vertical emphasis and
asymmetry. Thus Passer laid the foundations for the scenic
architecture in Tallinn. Its ideas have been consistently
followed in rebuilding the Hansa period houses: a house with
strong supporting walls was not destroyed in the process of
modernisation; instead the system of openings and decor on
the façade were altered, providing the ancient
building with a modern frontal - a scenery.
Passer's descendants, his son Dionysius and other
disciples imitated the master's style in ever more
provincial manner; moving smoothly from late Renaissance
form and ornamentation to dynamic Baroque.
In the early 17th century, many of the churches pillaged
in wars got new inventory, altars and pulpits, pews and
communion chalices, etc. Among the masters of sacral art,
mention should be made of such prominent wood carvers as
Berent Geistmann and Tobias Heintze whose work has partly
survived even today. The painters of that period are mostly
only known through records, because the few surviving altar
paintings and painted epitaphs are not attributable. As for
orientation in art, it may be said that even during Swedish
rule, Estonia was still strongly influenced by the North
German regions and the Netherlands, through their relatively
sober, Palladian burgher architecture, through their
portrait painters who valued reality and through the silver
forgings after the fashion of the Hansa period.
A foreign visitor on a short visit in Estonia and in
search of the traces of Renaissance, should first go to the
Tallinn Cathedral, St Nicholas Church, Holy Ghost Church,
the building of the Blackhead Brotherhood and the display of
ancient ashlars in the cloisters of St Catherine's
Monastery. There the visitor can get an inkling that,
despite the wars, the era of Dürer, Holbein and Raffael
has not vanished in Estonia.
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Arent
Passer. Tombstone of Pontus de la Gardie and Sophia
Gyllenhielma
Arent
Passer. Portals of the Blackhead Brotherhood's
house
Arent
Passer. Façade of the Blackhead
Brotherhood's
house
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