Bern sculpture find

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The Bern sculpture find was made in 1986 in the cathedral platform in Bern . It includes late Gothic stone sculptures that were destroyed in the iconoclasm in 1528 . The recovered fragments are now in the Historical Museum in Bern.

Location: Bern Minster Platform

The Bern Minster Platform is a 14th-century terrace over 30 meters high. It lies between the Bern Minster and the Aare and originally served as a cemetery. From 1479 there was an expansion for which a lot of bulk material was required. When, in the course of the Reformation, the Bernese council decided to remove the images in 1528, it decided that the stone idols should be disposed of in the chute in the churchyard.

In February 1986, renovation work began on the retaining masonry in the southwest corner of the cathedral platform. When the shaft dug for this purpose reached a depth of 14 meters, the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern came across around 550 sculpture fragments.

The sculptures

The find includes sculptures from around 1400 to the Reformation period in the 1520s. Although all the figures show traces of destruction and have survived only as fragments, they provide for art history major reference works is. Where the surfaces are undamaged, they were perfectly preserved by storage in the ground and have partially still abundant remains of the original polychrome on .

As masterpieces of late Gothic sculpture deserve attention:

  1. Pietà of the Soft Style from a Prague workshop, around 1400/1410
  2. The Saint George slaying the dragon, 1430
  3. Heads of four figures of saints, probably Albrecht of Nuremberg, around 1510/20

A larger inventory from the sculpture find comes from the minster master craftsman Erhart Küng , u. a. the crucifix donated by Heinrich IV von Bubenberg and the Archangel Michael of Niklaus von Scharnachtal.

exhibition

The find has been exhibited in the Historisches Museum Bern since 1999 and was the focus of the exhibition in 2000 . Madness or God's will? in Bern and Strasbourg .

literature

  • Urs Zumbrunn and Daniel Gutscher: Bern. The sculpture finds on the cathedral platform. Catalog of figurative and architectural sculpture. Staatlicher Lehrmittelverlag, Bern 1994, ISBN 3-258-05064-3 .
  • Franz-Josef Sladeczek: The Bern Sculpture Find . The results of the art historical evaluation . Benteli, Wabern-Bern 1999, ISBN 3-7165-1090-4 .
  • Cécile Dupeux, Peter Jezler , Jean Wirth (eds.): Iconoclasm. Madness or God's will. Exhibition catalog. Bernisches Historisches Museum, Bern / Musée de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame, Strasbourg. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 2000, ISBN 3-85823-853-8 .

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