Cvetnic AHAS 5angl
Sanja CVETNIĆ
The works of the Ljubljana painter Ioannes Eisenhordt at Kaptol in Zagreb
The painter Ioannes Eisenhordt was one of numerous artists who came to Zagreb from, or via, Ljubljana. The documents from the latter town do not prove him to be highly valued there, but in Zagreb his name is found in contracts signed for the furnishing of the cathedral with works of art. On the grounds of the hitherto interpretations of documents scholarly literature most often mentions him, together with the Zagreb painter Bernard Bobić, as the coauthor of the painted cycle on the former polyptich of the Virgin in the south choire of the cathedral. The discernment between and the problems of the two painters' authorial shares aroused some discussion the most important of which was the one between the restorer of the paintings, Zvonimir Wyroubal, who attributes most of them to Bobić, and Anđela Horvat, who bases her argument on the comparison with two documented works by Bobić in St. Catherine's church in Zagreb and rejects Wyroubal's attribution. The notes made in 1692 by the executor of Bishop Martin Borković's will about the payments for the lost altar that once decorated the chapel of St. Martin exactly define the distribution according to which the paintings were explicitly paid to pictor Ioannes, the retable to sculptor Ioannes Komerstainer and the gilding to pictor Bernardus. This information can serve as a formula of demarcation between the works of the Kaptol trio Eisenhordt – Komersteiner – Bobić also in more prominent commissions, the Virgin's altar in particular in which case the three of them were all bound by contract. Stylistic comparisons reveal that added to the Virgin's cycle can be the paintings of St. Ladislaus' cycle from the north choir of the cathedral; however, the only surviving document is the contract signed with Bernardo Bobić for the polychromation and gilding. The two groups of paintings share a number of characteristics: fragmented sections, compressed and illegible space crowded with elongated figures, intensely lowered point of vision, height and depth asymmetries, a vertical construction of space, Mannerist verticalism of figures, incoherent perspective and illumination, chromatic intensity in the foreground and monochrome translucency of the background, and numerous typological parallels. Deduced from Borković's will and its execution can be another information about the payment to pictor Ioannes, namely for the bishop's posthumous portrait. As a matter of fact, the Diocesan Museum (Dijecezanski muzej) in Zagreb does indeed house a portrait inscribed with the date of Borković's death, i.e. the last of October, 1687. Although belonging to a different genre, the painting has much in common with the cathedral pieces, therefore it can be safely included in Eisenhordt's oeuvre. Furthermore, a list of other contemporary Zagreb painters of the same name and the examination of archival sources about them show Eisenhordt as the most likely author of the bishop's portrait and the most outstanding painter "Ioannes" at Kaptol. By stylistic comparisons his authorship can be extended to two more paintings: the Portrait of Andreas Francisci and the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, both in the Diocesan Museum, Zagreb.