Barbara MUROVEC

The Baroque frescoed ceilings in Carniola and Styria and the reproductive prints after Simon Vouet and Charles le Brun

The article discusses iconographical and compositional models for the frescoed ceilings of three Baroque castles in the present-day Slovenia. Their pictorial sources can be identified in the reproductive prints after Simon Vouet and Charles Le Brun. In the last quarter of the 17th century the painter at the Castle of Bokalce (Stroblhof) adopted Vouet's Four Cardinal Virtues (1636-1638) and Le Brun's Summer, designed in 1664 for the series of tapestries at Versailles. Five out of the ten mythological allegories by Vouet, formerly in the lower gallery of l'Hôtel Sčguier, and the Four Elements after Le Brun's cartoons of 1664 - as well as the latter's Four Times of the Day (before 1642) - were copied at the Castle of Štatenberg (Stattenberg, end of 17th century). In one of the smaller chambers in the Castle of Slovenska Bistrica (Windisch Feistritz) the fresco of Cybele impersonating the Earth (c. 1700) matches Vouet's painting of the same subject from the lost cycle for Fontainebleau, while a segment of the ceiling fresco (1722) by F. I. Flurer in the Festsaal was derived from Vouet's France Asking the Gods for a Minister (formerly Hôtel Sčguier). The Carniolan and Styrian fresco painters were obviously not familiar with the French originals, nor did they use Dorigny's and Le Clerc's reproductive engravings; rather they adoperated the second-hand copies of them, engraved by B. Zaech, J. S. Krauß (née Küsel) and B. Killian in Augsburg.