Arnd von Gröpelingen

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Detail from the tomb of Arnd von Gröpelingen from the Ansgariikirche in Bremen, now the Focke Museum .

Arnd von Gröpelingen (* around 1250 ; † 1304 in Bremen ) was a Bremen councilor .

biography

Arnd von Gröpelingen came from a ministerials family , so from a state of the service or Ministerialadels (a kind of official) in the High Middle Ages . The family got its name from the then small village of Gröpelingen near Bremen. In the 13th century, a branch of the family belonged to the upper class in Bremen, so u. a. Luder van Gropelinghe , who was on the town council from 1250 to 1260. Knight Arndt van Gropelinghe was mentioned around 1283 to 1304. He was in the city council from 1284 and lived in a stone residential tower in Langenstrasse near the city ​​scales .

Legal uncertainty and increasing conflicts between the city council of Bremen and the ruling families with land and pensions - called "genders" for short - led to the council feud of 1304/1305 at the beginning of the 14th century , during which the seriously ill Arnd von Gröpelingen and his Servants of supporters of the councilor Gottschalk Frese's party were murdered. His death caused considerable unrest, in the course of which Frese and numerous other council members and their families were expelled from the city by the "decent" councilors and citizens. A military conflict followed between the city and the exiles who had allied themselves with parts of the knighthood of the surrounding area. In 1305 the city defeated the followers of Freses, whose return to the council was prevented. By 1308 the conflict led to a codification of Bremen's city law , which was laid down in writing , and the more aristocratic patricians lost some privileges.

The von Gröpelingen family provided councilors in Bremen in the 15th century.

Arnd von Gröpelingen († 1304), grave figure. Focke-Museum Bremen, loan from the St. Ansgarii community in Bremen

The grave monument of Arnd von Gröpelingen

The grave monument, formerly erected in the old St. Ansgarii Church , is highly remarkable both in terms of art history (sculptural tombs are still very rare around 1300 and usually reserved for bishops or secular rulers) and in terms of urban history (as a testimony to politically motivated monument setting ) significant.

The cover plate of the formerly colored grave tumba , exhibited on loan at the Focke Museum since 1964, shows the figure of a reclining man in high relief. He is shown with his eyes open, dressed in a fur-lined coat and a beret-like cap. The material is a glauconite-bearing sand-lime brick (Baumberge or Stemmer Berge near Haldem), identical to that of the Mindener rood screen.

Even the Chronica of Johann Renner (1580) brings the grave plate with the person of Arnd and the circumstances of the murder have already been described by Rienesberg / Schene at the Bremen alderman together. In 1661, perhaps in connection with a relocation of the slab to an arcade pillar of the south nave wall, which was then only made , a Latin inscription was added to the upright grave slab : “ Monumentum Dn. Arnoldi de Gröpeling viri nobilis et consularis Reip. Bre. una cum protectore famulo sub agone mortis nefarie confossi A. C. MCCCVII a filiis ejusdem Gotefrido et Arnoldo de Gröpeling quondam erectum. Renovatum from aedilibus divi Ansgarii ” . (Monument to the distinguished Bremen councilor Arnold von Gröpelingen, who was ruthlessly stabbed in agony with his protective servant, erected in 1307 by his sons Gottfried and Arnold) . The sculpture was first classified scientifically by Fliedner (1957), but his description of the contemporary historical background (“emerging democratic currents”) is absurd. In terms of style and history, Fliedner has convincingly brought the figure together with the sculpture cycle on the former rood screen in Minden , which today, however, is dated between 1230 and 1250. From this, W. Grape (1993) concluded that the Bremen tomb must also have been erected around the middle of the 13th century for another person, a clerical or secular donor of feudal origin. The destruction of the iconoclasts escaped the fact that the chronicler Renner had withdrawn the monument by identifying "with the supposedly just pioneer of a bourgeois rule".

However, there are no historical parallels to the suggestion that an existing tomb was “renamed”. The small figure holding the pillow, which suggests an identification with the loyal servant Arnds, who was murdered at the same time and who was already part of medieval tradition, was reinterpreted by Grape to support his argument: he saw in her an angel , like him, also holding a pillow , traditionally belongs to the tomb iconography . Against such an interpretation, which would also require a subsequent processing of the angel's wings, the consistently paired appearance of such grave angels at that time, the relatively short-cut hair and the (with its clear shoulder seams "leather" and profane) "unangelical" doublet of a servant speak . If, however, a servant is depicted here, this again speaks in favor of an Arndt-related production that was realized soon after 1304. The contradictions between clear historical tradition and objections from the history of style that cannot be easily refuted are difficult to resolve.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inv. 81.59. - On loan from the St Ansgarii Congregation. - length 209 cm. - Sand-lime brick, originally painted (red traces of paint on the robe, blue on the lining).
  2. ^ Siegfried Fliedner: The old St. Ansgarii Church . Bremen 1957, p. 27.
  3. ^ Johann Renner: Chronica of the city of Bremen . Transcription by Liselotte Klink, Bremen 1995, fol. 232.
  4. ↑ The Bremen chronicle of Rienesberch, Schene and Hemeling. (The Chronicles of German Cities, Volume 37, Bremen 1968, p. 112 ff.)
  5. ↑ Quoted here from Storck, p. 272, handed down in: Staatsarchiv Bremen T.4.a.2.g.1.
  6. ^ Siegfried Fliedner: The master of the former Minden rood screen and his style . Minden 1957; and Fliedner: The old St. Ansgarii Church . Bremen 1957, pp. 19-30.
  7. ↑ The Mindener Lettner can in turn be traced back to the sculpture of the Paradiesportals in Paderborn and Münster, which since the undisputed classification of Willibald Sauerländer : The Art-Historical Position of the Figure Portals of the 13th Century in Westphalia . In: Westphalia. Volume 49, 1971, pp. 1-76 can be dated back almost half a century.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Grape: Two sculptures and the early middle class in Bremen . In: Low German Contributions to Art History 32 . 1993, pp. 50-63.
personal data
SURNAME Gröpelingen, Arnd von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gropelinghe, Arndt van
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bremen councilor
DATE OF BIRTH around 1250
DATE OF DEATH 1304
Place of death Bremen