Serazin AHAS 6angl
Helena SERAŽIN
The shrine of the Holy Virgin at Log near Vipava. The architectural history of the church, 1622–1759
It has always been taken as read in Slovene art history literature that the pilgrimage church of the Holy Virgin at Log near Vipava was (almost) entirely built in the early 1620s. However, some documents in the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia (Arhiv Republike Slovenije) prove that the church of imperial benefice at Log was given its characteristic image of a hall with two narrow aisles (transformed into lateral chapels in the 19th century) topped with a gallery as late as the first half of the 18th century.
The erroneous dating of the church was based on two years, 1619 and 1622, one carved into the wall of the bell-tower and the other into the rear wall of the presbytery. But 17th century visitation reports of the Vidame Office for Carniola reveal that in that time the architectural scheme of the church did not essentially differ from other nearby parish churches: it was most probably a simple building consisting of a nave, a rather spacious presbytery with three-sided termination, and only one bell-tower. Besides the high altar, dedicated to the Holy Virgin, it originally had only two side altars (of St. Nicholas and St. Catherine) standing by the chancel-arch wall, and before 1687 it received another altar, the one of the Agony of Christ (Agonia Christi). All of the four altars had gilt wooden retables.
Because this original church was too small for the great numbers of the pious who wanted to attend the liturgy inside it, in 1718 the beneficiary Janez Friderik Schwiger, the parish priest of Vipava, commissioned plans for a new, bigger building with two bell-towers which was to be of an oval shape inside and should contain a number of vaulted chapels. The construction of the new church began that same year, but it appears that shortly after 1737 certain reductions of the original plan must have been done, so that, at the first sight, the building completed by 1747 strongly resembled Gorizia Cathedral: it consisted of a rectangular hall with two lateral passages on the ground floor and a gallery above them. Next to the bell-towers two low structures flanked the presbytery; one served as s sacristy and the other was the Loreto Chapel. The church was probably five bays long from the very beginning; after 1759 an organ loft was built which completely occupied the last bay.
Besides the already mentioned Gorizia Cathedral, a possible model for this type of a church, unusual for the shrines in the Primorsko part of Slovenia, could have also been the Jesuit church of St. Ignatius in Gorizia, since the appearance of its hall-like interior, intensified by chapels and a high gallery over them, is almost identical with the appearance of the Log church (the nave of the Gorizia Jesuit church was finished by 1721 at the latest). The difference between them is mainly in the execution of the system of interior butresses because the ones in the Log church, due to the low and too wide arcade arches on the ground floor, appear flattened, thus causing that the feeling of the upward flight present in the Gorizia Jesuit church is completely lost here. This can lead us to the conclusion that the architect who designed the plan for the new church at Log did not supervise its execution afterwards, and that, judging from the models employed in the modification of the plan, the protomagister most probably came from Gorizia. We are not familiar with his name, but we do know the name of the architect.
In a document of 1737 a building master Martinuzzi, already dead at that time, is mentioned as the author of the plan, and a payment of 100 ducati to him between 1726 and 1737 is documented twice (1737 and 1739). It is not likely that the stated Martinuzzi could be the Friulian building master Bernardino (1669–1735); rather he is the Ljubljana architect Carlo Martinuzzi (ca. 1674–before 1727), also a native of Friuli. His best-known works in Ljubljana are the unrealized plan for the reconstruction of the cathedral, a plan for the Town-Hall, the Ursuline church, the Seminary and the palaces of Strassoldo and Flödnig. As head engineer of the Province he left for Trieste after 1720, where he collaborated in the construction of the Lazaretto and the docks in the harbour. He might have received the commission for the church at Log through the agency of a friend, Count Gallenberg, Governor General of Carniola, since Log was an imperial benefice, but being head engineer of the Province, it is quite possible that he received this task directly, as was the case in Postojna in 1725. Even the parish priest Schweiger himself might have commissioned the plan from Carlo Martinuzzi, because his brother, Karel Henrik Schweiger, was a member of the Academia Operosorum and was certainly acquainted with the architect. The "Carniolan" Martinuzzi's authorship of the shrine at Log near Vipava is, last but not least, corroborated also by the unusual combination of Roman and Venetian elements which can be understood from the description of the plan and seen in the final execution of the building, since this kind of eclecticism can already be traced in the Ursuline church in Ljubljana.