Grüssau Passion Book
The Grüssauer Passionsbuch is a devotional book for the stations of the Grüssauer Kalvarienberg .
Abbot Bernhard Rosa of the Cistercian monastery in Grüssau had a calvary built near the monastery between 1675 and 1678. The Calvary consists of 32 stations that represent the path of the capture of Jesus (stations I-XVI) and the Way of the Cross (stations XVII-XXXII). A prayer book was to be created for devotion to the individual stations, with which the story of Jesus' passion could be vividly visualized.
The devotional book was published in 1682 and 1687 under the title
- Schmertzhaffter Lieb- and Creutz-Weeg, which on earth at the end of his life through Trueb- and Trangsaal ... willingly entered the world Heyl, the way, the truth and the life, of course, the God Christ Jesus incorporated out of the love of mankind, as he chose to die by a miserable death ... at the Creutz
Edited by Abbot Bernhard Rosa and printed by the Andreas Frantz Pega publishing house in Glatz . It contains songs, prayers, poems and pictures. The texts are by Angelus Silesius († 1677), the melodies by the Breslau cathedral music director Georg Joseph († around 1668).
The Grüssau Passion Book is particularly precious because of the 32 pictures of the Passion story, the designs of which were created by the famous baroque painter Michael Willmann . They are series of pictures in small format (about 12.9 × 8.5 cm) with moving scenes of the Passion.
Willmanns designs were by the renowned graphic artist Georg Andreas Wolfgang and Jacob von Sandrart from Nuremberg and Melchior Küsel from Augsburg in etchings transmitted.
Scenes from the Grüssau Passion Book can also be found on the choir stalls in the former Cistercian monastery Heinrichau . There they were used as templates for the bas-reliefs on the armrests.
The graphic collection of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart owns 19 draft drawings of the Grüssau Passion Book. They were shown in an exhibition from November 19, 2005 to February 5, 2006.