Christian Precht
Christian Precht (* around 1635 probably in Oldenburg ; † probably between April 1694 and September 1695 in Hamburg ) was a Hamburg sculptor . In addition to his main activity as a creator of church furnishings and altarpieces, he created carvings on Hamburg buildings and city gates as well as the figures and wood carvings for the four Hamburg convoy ships Leopoldus Primus , Wapen von Hamburg I , Wapen von Hamburg II and the Admiralty of Hamburg .
Life
Precht was born around 1635 as the son of the carpenter Johann Precht and his wife Alheit. Karin Eckhardt suspects the city of Oldenburg to be the place of birth, as the father worked at the court of Oldenburg Count Anton Günther at the time. The exact position in which he worked there is not known, as the name Precht does not appear in the sources. Presumably he was one of the many craftsmen who were needed at the court of the art-promoting count.
Around 1650 the father settled in Bremen . At this time Christian Precht was ready to begin training as a sculptor and carpenter; he is likely to have left his parents' house in the early 1650s. His wandering lasted until around 1660 and probably led him to the southern Netherlands . Then he settled as a master in Hamburg .
Christian Precht first appears in the sources in 1663. That year, on August 7th, he paid the new residents' fee, the so-called Bürgergeld , to the city of Hamburg, and on November 22nd, he married Agnetha Rige. At this time he was most likely already a master in the Hamburg carpenters ' guild, known as the Schnitger 's office, and probably lived in the Hamburg parish of St. Jacobi, because he married in the St. Jacobi Church and let his two eldest sons in in 1665 and 1667 respectively baptize this church.
In 1666 Christian Precht took his younger brother Burchard into his workshop as an apprentice, who was probably involved in the first verifiable and clearly Precht works. This is about the characters and the wooden decorations on the two Hamburg convoy ships Leopoldus Primus and Wapen von Hamburg I . From these works, the large rear figure of Emperor Leopold I has been preserved and is now kept in the Museum of Hamburg History . Christian Precht received the sum of 1544 marks from the city of Hamburg for the work on the two ships . This sum enabled him to purchase a house on December 30, 1668, which was in the parish of St. Katharinen on Wandrahm Island, right next to the town's old building yard. The house was thus located near today's “Neuer Wandrahm” street in Hamburg's warehouse district . Presumably Precht hadn't chosen the house without intent. In the vicinity of his main client in those years and in the vicinity of the canal for transporting his works, he found the best working conditions. In addition to the work on the two convoy ships, only a few works can be identified in the 1660s, including a carving for the St. Jakobi Church.
In 1674 he was commissioned to build the altar for the Church of St. Cosmae et Damiani in Stade , which was to become his main work. Work on the altarpiece was finished after three years, and Precht delivered the work in April 1677. Already in 1674 his brother Burchard had left the joint workshop and went to Sweden. The contact between the two brothers did not break, however, and so Burchard recommended several Hamburg craftsmen in Stockholm, including the organ builder Arp Schnitger , who was supposed to build an organ in Uppsala . In the year after the altarpiece was completed, Precht took on the next larger order. The Church of St. Jakobi had some houses built in its churchyard. For the gate entrance Precht carved evangelist figures , which served as decoration on the portal-like frames.
In the early 1680s Christian Precht delivered several works for the Hamburg building yard and for various churches in the city. He made the jewelry for the Millerntor , the Deichtor and the Neue Waage built in 1676. There were also numerous smaller works that were attached to buildings that were no longer identifiable. At the beginning of May 1685 his wife died and was buried in St. Katharinen. There is no evidence of a second marriage after the death of his wife.
In the second half of the 1680s and the early 1690s Precht received more and more large orders. Around 1685 he made an altar structure for the Dreikönigskirche in Haselau , which is located in the Haseldorfer Marsch on the Lower Elbe . From 1686 to 1688 and 1691/92 Precht again received orders to equip convoy ships from the Hamburg Admiralty . Since the Wapen von Hamburg I had burned in the roadstead of Cádiz in 1683 for unknown reasons, a new building was started. The fact that Precht was still able to present the plans for his work on the first two ships should have been an advantage for the award of the contract. On March 16, 1686 he was commissioned to carve the Wapen von Hamburg II . He worked on it until 1687. Since the Leopoldus Primus was getting on in years and was in need of repair, he received the order in 1689 and again in 1688 to repair the carving and the rear figure of the emperor. Precht received the fourth order to deliver the carving on a Hamburg convoy ship in 1691. This time he was to equip the much smaller Admiralty of Hamburg . Similar to the Leopoldus Primus , Precht equipped the stern with a figure, this time with that of a melancholy-looking admiral.
The figures on the organ front of the Arp Schnitger organ in the Church of St. Jakobi, which he made around 1691, are among the latest known works by Precht . Some works from the years 1692 to 1694 can be deduced from the sources, but little is known about them.
The exact date of Christian Precht's death is unknown. It can only be narrowed down more precisely by the records of the building yard. The name Prechts appears for the last time on April 7, 1694 in the accounts of the building yard, and in September 1695 a Jürgen Brese is mentioned as the only sculptor in the service of the building yard. At the time of his daughter's marriage in 1703, Christian Precht is described as deceased. According to this, Christian Precht most likely died between April 1694 and September 1695.
Works
The following section gives an overview of the most important works by Christian Precht. In addition, he also created a large number of other works, which, however, were often not of such a high artistic level, but primarily served to earn a living. In addition, due to the loss of documents and the willful destruction of traditional cultural assets during the 19th century in Hamburg, it is no longer possible to identify which works Christian Precht created. Karin Eckhardt puts it this way:
- In the 19th century one can confidently speak of complete indifference to traditional art.
With the construction of the Speicherstadt and the demolition of many medieval buildings during this time, many works by Precht and other artists and builders have been irretrievably lost.
Church furnishings
Stade
The earliest and at the same time most important altar structure created by Christian Precht is that from the Church of St. Cosmae et Damiani in Stade . The other two plants in Haselau and Neuenfelde are much smaller and more modest. With its considerable size of 9.20 m, the Stader altar structure is adapted to the high choir of the Gothic parish church and is very elaborately designed with its numerous figures and scenic representations. In addition, although it was made exclusively from wood, black and red marble for the architectural parts and alabaster for the figures were imitated by appropriate painting .
In terms of content and structure, the essay is centered on the relief on the suffering of Christ, which, reduced to the most important stages, leads to the resurrection . The figure of John the Baptist , which stands on the far right on the upper floor, points with her hand to the salvation event in the middle. According to Protestant teaching, this is supposed to symbolize that only the faith and grace of God lead to salvation from sins. The plasticity of the structure through reliefs , free-standing columns, ledges , figures and other architectural details is striking .
The altar structure is a uniform and closed work, which is unique for northern Germany due to its baroque design and splendor. A similarly complex work has otherwise not survived in the Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and northern Lower Saxony area. Other well-known altar structures from this period are mostly still committed to the late Renaissance and stylistically have nothing in common with Precht's work.
The altarpiece from 1662 from the Church of St. Petri and St. Pauli in Bergedorf , attributed to Christian Precht as an early work, is more likely to be assigned to the Renaissance style. Therefore, the large altar structure of the Stockholm Storkyrkan from 1654 is regarded as a model for the Stade work . An altar structure in St. Michaelis Church, which is no longer preserved, and other works in Northern Germany were probably modeled on this Stockholm altar structure, which was already considered a famous work by contemporaries. The reliefs and figures in Stade are very similar to the work in Stockholm, although Precht was less skillful. Since Stade was the seat of government of the Duchy of Bremen, which belonged to Sweden after the Thirty Years War , it seems credible that the client saw the famous work in Stockholm as a model for the altar of one of the city's most important churches and prescribed the artist's program of images.
Haselau
The smallest and simplest of the preserved altar pieces is the one in the Dreikönigskirche in Haselau, which was made around 1685. The work was created by Detlev von Ahlefeldt and his wife Ida geb. Donated by Pogwisch The architecture of the altar structure is clearly structured, dispenses with playful accessories and is reminiscent of the portal architecture of that time. The special depth graduation as in Stade is not given here either.
As is usual with Protestant altars, the pictorial program consists of the crucifixion and the resurrection in the middle. A trumpet angel at the top of the essay leads over to the ceiling painting of the choir of the church, which is quite unusual. From this harmony of the altar and the painting, the origin of the altar work can be derived, since the year of creation of the ceiling painting is known. The pictures on the altar were created by the Hamburg painter Paul Forkel based on Dutch motifs by Hendrick Goltzius . It is not known whether they were created especially for this purpose or later added to the altar.
The central painting of the crucifixion is flanked by the figures of Paul and Peter. On the top floor there are figures of Johannes with the poison cup and Matthew with the ax. Unusually they are depicted here not as evangelists but as apostles .
Neuenfelde
The third preserved altarpiece from 1688 from the St. Pankratius Church in Neuenfelde is the oldest pulpit altar in Northern Germany. This is unusually early as pulpit altars only become customary here from around 1730. There were probably never pulpit altars in Hamburg itself. In the case of a pulpit altar, the pulpit, which is otherwise structurally separate from the altar, forms a unit with it. The pulpit altar in Neuenfelde is a so-called gallery pulpit altar, in which the actual altar structure retains its independence. The pulpit altar is one of the few architectural innovations of Protestantism, which otherwise attaches less importance to the interior design of the church than Catholicism.
Compared to the simple Haselau Altar, Christian Precht again used significantly more decorative elements and also used them as a means of connecting architectural parts. In the performance program, special emphasis is placed on the proclamation of the Gospel - a general characteristic of such pulpit altars. On the pulpit there are figures of the four evangelists, and next to the pulpit are two angels with bell and hammer, symbolizing the word of God. The painting on the underside of the sound cover of the pulpit shows an angel with an open book and thus also refers to the spread of redemption through Christ. The central painting of the altar structure describes the resurrection of Christ, the goal of faith, without the altar depicting the individual steps leading to it, as in Stade.
For the design of a pulpit altar, which is unprecedented in the region, Christian Precht is unlikely to be a possible source of ideas. The Hamburg organ builder Arp Schnitger, known for a long time with Christian Precht, who worked at the same time as Precht in Neuenfelde, was probably used as an adviser. Perhaps Schnitger had heard of the new form from Saxony or Thuringia or had seen it there himself and suggested such a building in Neuenfelde. Since the organ, pulpit and altar had to form an architectural unit, he is likely to have worked on the design of the pulpit altar.
Carvings on Hamburg buildings
Most of Christian Precht's livelihood was probably due to his work on various buildings in Hamburg, especially since these were often of a simple nature and were probably carried out by his journeymen. Since half-timbered construction played a much larger role in Hamburg in the late 17th century than building with stone and brick and some new settlement areas were opened up for the city, this statement certainly applies to the members of the Schnitger Office, the guild of carpenters, as a whole to. While the carpenters were making the beams of the half-timbered houses, the carpenters had the task of adding decorative ornamentation to the gables, the frames, profiles and other parts of the house. The house was built in the traditional way, but the decorations were subject to contemporary tastes. At that time, the houses were literally "baroque" through the carvings. Inside, too, such a house offered the Schnitger many opportunities for employment.
The documents that have been preserved provide a fairly good picture of the very little preserved works from Christian Precht's workshop. Among other things, he made angel and lion heads, columns, half-length portraits and weather vanes there . Ornaments on carriages were also part of the tasks that his workshop took on.
On behalf of the city's building yard, Christian Precht worked on the Millerntor, the stock exchange, the Neue Waage and the Deichtor. Even if it is not known exactly how large his part in the design of these municipal buildings is, it is certain that Christian Precht was the preferred carver of the municipal building yard from 1681 to 1694. The most important architectural sculpture that Precht created is the no longer completely preserved gateway to the churchyard of St. Jacobi. The gate passage from the lively Steinstraße in the churchyard, which has been converted with half-timbered houses, was provided by Precht with depictions of the four evangelists and a statue of the apostle James. Parts of this passage are now in the Museum of Hamburg History, and the figure of the apostle is exhibited in the St. Jacobi Church.
Sculpture work on Hamburg convoy ships
Only five years after Christian Precht had acquired the citizenship of the city of Hamburg, gave him the Commercial Deputation founded in 1665, a representative of the Hamburg merchants, the sculptors work on the two newly constructed convoy ships Leopoldus Primus and Wapen von Hamburg I . The transom of Leopoldus Primus was associated with a 2.50-meter-high figure of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I decorated. In addition to the military equipment of a ship, its jewelry should also express military and economic power. That is why both ships were carved in baroque splendor. This splendor was underlined by a painting that was visible from afar. The emperor and the admiral at the Admiralty of Hamburg, built twenty years later, were subject to completely different necessities than the other work of Precht. With the Leopold figure, Precht created an image of the emperor, which, in the opinion of his contemporaries, served its purpose.
According to legend, the monumental figure of the emperor and his clearly carved, typical Habsburg chin alone are said to have led Turkish pirates to flee from the ship. Certainly not meant very seriously, namely their then captain Berent Jakobsen Karpfanger reports that the pirates fled because the emperor is looking too serious .
Otherwise nothing can be said about the entirety of Precht's work on the Leopoldus Primus , since no really credible photo documents have survived. The written sources of the Admiralty only give information about the scope of the work, but not about its form. Karin Eckhardt tries to describe the work using an engraving by Joachim Wichmann from 1675, but overlooks the fact that this engraving is a plagiarism of an older engraving by the Dutch engraver Wenzel Hollar , who is believed to be the warship de Holland'sche Magd in the Tuin shows. In the only painting that definitely depicts Leopoldus Primus , the “View of the City of Hamburg from the Elbe Side” by Elias Galli , which is dated around 1680, the design of the stern differs significantly from that of Wichmann. But details that provide more precise information about Precht's work on the Leopoldus Primus are unfortunately not discernible in Galli.
On the ship Wapen von Hamburg I , which was built about a year later and which is identical to the Leopoldus Primus , Christian Precht made a large seal of the city of Hamburg attached to the transom. This was held by two lions. Otherwise the design might have been similar to that of the Leopoldus Primus . Less is known about the work on the Wapen von Hamburg II , built in 1686 , with regard to Precht's work, even if the so-called Bauzerter, the building contract, was handed down here. A font printed in 1687 contains a copper engraving , according to which this ship was probably even more lavishly decorated with carvings. There was also a large coat of arms of Hamburg in the mirror, which was held by two lions. Above the coat of arms sat a female, helmeted figure.
Like Emperor Leopold, the admiral that Christian Precht created for the smallest of the convoy ships, the Admiralty of Hamburg , built in 1691 , can hardly be compared with his other work. Since Precht very often used templates for his works, it is conceivable that he used work on Dutch ships as a model. But why Precht designed this figure with a seemingly lost, even melancholy facial expression will probably never be clarified.
literature
- Karin Eckhardt: Christian Precht - A Hamburg sculptor in the second half of the 17th century (= contributions to the history of Hamburg. Vol. 32). Association for Hamburg History, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-923356-18-8 .
- Wolfgang Quinger: coat of arms of Hamburg I. A convoy ship of the 17th century. Delius, Klasing, Bielefeld 1980, ISBN 3-7688-0329-5 .
Web links
- Tour through the church in Haselau with pictures of the altar structure
- Description of the interior of the church in Neuenfelde
Remarks
- ^ Eckhardt: Christian Precht - A Hamburg sculptor. 1987, p. 7.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Precht, Christian |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Hamburg sculptor and carver |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1635 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | uncertain: Oldenburg (Oldenburg) |
| DATE OF DEATH | between April 1694 and September 1695 |
| Place of death | Hamburg |