Martin Mádl (ed.)
This two-volume art-historical study devoted to the painters Carpoforo Tencalla (1623–1685) and his younger cousin and pupil Giacomo Tencalla (1644–1689) came into being as part of a programme focusing on the documentation of and research into 17th- and 18th-century ceiling paintings in the Czech lands, which is being developed by the Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in collaboration with other institutions in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
The first volume of the book includes essays dealing with the lives of the two artists, describing those who commissioned their work, examining the character of their work as painters, and considering within broader contexts the nature of the commissions that these painters were involved in. Other artists who worked with these fresco painters on extensive representative projects are referred to in excursuses. The first volume also includes a select list of the written sources that refer to the life and work of the two Tencallas and their activity in Bohemia and Moravia.
The second volume contains a catalogue of the ceiling paintings that the Tencallas created in Moravia and Bohemia. The catalogue is divided into fourteen separate chapters focusing on individual projects, and includes all the cycles of wall and ceiling paintings by both artists in what is today the Czech Republic which we know of, both those that have been preserved and those that have not survived but are recorded in archive sources. It provides information on the chateau in Náměšť nad Oslavou, the buildings in the Flover gardens in Kroměříž, the Archbishop’s Palace in Olomouc, the pilgrimage church of the Visitation on the Holy Hill (Svatý Kopeček) near Olomouc, the chateaus in Roudnice nad Labem, Lnáře, Troja, and Libochovice, and other sacred and secular buildings in Bohemia and Moravia. The catalogue also includes paintings which, while not the work of either Carpoforo or Giacomo Tencalla, were created as an integral part of a broader thematic programme in the buildings discussed.
The authors of the texts are Marjeta Ciglenečki, Polona Vidmar, Radka Miltová, Andrea Rousová, Radka Tibitanzlová, Jana Zapletalová, Herbert Karner, Petr Maťa, Pavel Zahradník, Martin Halata, Petr Macek, Sylva Dobalová, Martin Krummholz and Martin Mádl.
First edition, in Czech, English summary, 499 + 647 p., colour illustrations, index of names and places, Praha 2012–2013
ISBN 978-80-86890-60-6
