Anna selbdritt (Stralsund)
This image of Anna selbdritt from the 13th century is in the church of St. Nikolai zu Stralsund . It shows St. Anne with her daughter Maria and the Christ child .
The sculpture is the second oldest sculpture in the church after a small, enthroned wooden Madonna, which is kept in the city's cultural history museum . It has stood in the second chapel of the northern ambulatory of St. Nikolai Church since 1938 .
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description
The picture of Anna Selbdritt in Stralsund's Nikolaikirche is made of stucco and oak and measures 2.24 meters high, 1.07 meters wide and 0.67 meters deep. It stands on a 0.30 meter thick plank, which in turn rests on a polygonal concrete base. Together with the seat of the throne, the figurines form a stucco body with an attached back wall made of wood. The rear wall consists of a central plank measuring 0.72 × 0.07 meters and two significantly narrower, side planks that form the throne posts. On the central plank there is a peg that - today without function - once supported the canopy . The stucco group of figures is not fully executed, but hollowed out on the back to Anna's shoulder. It consists of high-fired plaster of paris .
Saint Anne is seated on a throne with her daughter Maria on her left arm. The baby Jesus is sitting upright, cross-legged, on her thigh, with her right hand supporting his back. Both Anna and Maria wear a long-sleeved undershirt and over it a surcot and a wide coat. A light veil lies over their heads. The features of the two women are sparse but delicately drawn; Maria's head is smaller than that of her mother Anna. Both women's heads show remains of the incarnate . The right arm of Anna, the left hand of Maria and the head, both forearms and two toes on the left foot of the baby Jesus are missing.
Recesses in the torsos of Anna and Maria contained relics . These were shown in gold boxes with crystal lids.
The side rests of the throne are decorated with blind architecture in the form of three two-lane, ogival windows. Preserved paint residues indicate that the throne was set in gold with dark blue backgrounds.
The throne base is decorated with a frieze: angel busts in framed by a circle quatrefoil are by two rose petals isolated. The arms of the throne are "supported" by kneeling angels with arms spread; the head and part of the upper body of the angel are missing on the left cheek of the throne. The bases of the cheeks of the throne have angel busts similar to those on the frieze on the base.
history
Emergence
The sculpture was made of stucco and wood. The decorations on the wood were carved out of the wood. The stucco body was made using the casting technique, as indicated by the hollow on the back. A raw body was cast and then machined. The plaster of paris used does not show any contamination.
The size of the figure can be initially suspect that it was made on location in Stralsund, the executive unknown artists to the existing at the Nikolai Church Bauhütte might have heard. However, a connection cannot be further established; The execution of the stucco work on the choir pillars, which was only created later, in a completely different style, makes it unlikely that the artist of the figure of Anne belongs to the Stralsund building works.
For a long time it was assumed that the sculpture was made around 1300. Otto Schmitt was also of this opinion in 1931. Research and comparisons by Juliane von Fircks at the end of the 1990s suggest that it was written earlier. She locates the time of origin between around 1260 and 1270 and justifies this with the recognizable relationship of the figure to the French, especially Reims cathedral sculpture, as well as the Saxon sculpture, which results from the extremely pure plaster that is probably from Saxony. The rather rigid style of Anna Selbdritt from Stralsund can also be seen in typical German sculptures from the period after 1250. A dendrochronological examination of the oak confirms the assumption that the picture was made after 1260.
Location
The sculpture initially stood in the St. Anne's Chapel in St. Nicholas' Church for centuries. In the "Oldest Stralsundische Stadtbuch (1270-1310)" a guard is listed by name for 1307, who sits in front of a picture of Anne and is to be fed by the provisional staff of the church. This city book, a collection of contemporary legal decisions, lists an Anne's Chapel (“capella sancte Anne”) in 1309. From then on, the town book continued to list guardians of the image of Anne, who were to be granted lifelong maintenance by the church leaders. The guards' job was to guard the relics and collect offerings (money and natural goods).
The named Annenkapelle of the church was probably on the north-west side of the church in a previous building of the current two-bay vestibule, in which the portal to the old market opens. The churchgoers who entered the church from the Alter Markt thus passed the Annenkapelle and the statue of Anne on their way.
In 1938 it was moved to its current location in the north ambulatory.
Research history
The sculpture was described by historian Franz Kugler in his "Pomeranian Art History" in 1840 :
“(...) there is a colossal group made of stucco (...). She introduces St. Anna, the mother of Mary, who holds Mary on her lap, and she, in the same position, carries the Christ Child on her lap. The posture of the figures is still stiff, the circumstances are not entirely natural, but here, too, the arrangement of the drapery shows a noble sense, and in the somewhat broad faces an expression of peculiar mildness. This work, too, which is unfortunately somewhat damaged, still seems to belong to the fourteenth century. "
Just a few years later, efforts were made to restore the sculpture and to fill in the missing head of the Christ child and the missing limbs. The provisional arrangement of the Nikolaikirche proposed the painter Eduard Holbein to the city council in a letter dated March 22, 1855 for the intended restoration. Ignaz von Olfers , General Director of the Royal Museums in Berlin , wrote a letter to the head of the Prussian Ministry of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs , Karl Otto von Raumer , in 1856 , in which he suggested that the missing parts with the then new means to build.
“What the colossal figure of Heil. Anna made of stone or stucco in the Nikolaikirche in Stralsund, I would also like to vote for the production of the same, this is made much easier by the means we now have to form stone-hard masses of any color ... "
This project was not carried out, which is an advantage from today's art-historical point of view.
The Stralsund city architect Ernst von Haselberg briefly described the sculpture in 1902 in his inventory volume "The architectural monuments of the government district of Stralsund", in which he also listed some sources on the sculpture in the city books of Stralsund for the first time.
Otto Schmitt , Professor of Art History at the University of Greifswald , wrote the first essay solely on the stucco sculpture in 1931. He assigned the sculpture to Magdeburg art and gave “around 1300” as the date of origin. However, neither Ernst von Haselberg nor Otto Schmitt were able to pinpoint the exact location of the sculpture, which had stood in the ambulatory since 1938.
Later, in the 1930s to 1960s, the art historians Hans Wentzel and Nikolaus Zaske also dealt with the sculpture of Anna selbdritt. Nikolaus Zaske assumed that one of the ambulatory chapels was consecrated to Anna.
The art historians Antje Grewolls and Juliane von Fircks dealt with the work of art again in the late 1990s; At the end of the 1990s, Juliane von Fircks wrote extensive elaborations on the important stucco sculpture of the High Gothic. Antje Grewolls succeeded in her 1999 work “The Chapels of the North German Churches in the Middle Ages” in locating the location of the sculpture before it was implemented in 1938.
Trivia
Arnold Gustavs reports about Gerhart Hauptmann that he liked to look at the sculpture:
“An old sandstone sculpture from the 13th century is kept in Stralsund, the statue of Saint Anna Selbdritt; The poet often stood before her in admiration and said that she was like an ancient Magna Mater, one of those primordial mothers from whom the currents of life emanate. "
literature
- Otto Schmitt: Anna Selbdritt from Stralsund , in: Baltic Studies, NF Volume 33, Issue 1, Pages 65–88, 1931
- Juliane von Fircks, Volkmar Herre: Anna Selbdritt. A colossal high Gothic stucco sculpture in St. Nikolai zu Stralsund , Edition herre, Stralsund 1999, ISBN 3-932014-08-1
- Paul-Ferdi Lange (Ed.): When rooms sing. St. Nikolai zu Stralsund , Edition herre, Stralsund 2001, ISBN 3-932014-11-1
