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Markus Hörsch

Dr Markus Hörsch: Art historian, long-standing project collaborator at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, specialist in questions of artistic exchange between western and eastern central Europe, interested in architecture, its furnishings and functional contexts in the Middle Ages and early modern times.

is co-editor of the publication series Studia Jagellonica Lipsiensia since many years and author of numerous articles on late medieval art, most recently in Central Germany, Lower Saxony and Bohemia. Of several large exhibition catalogues, on which he played a leading role, the last one for the First Bohemian-Bavarian State Exhibition „Kaiser Karl IV. 1316–2016“ may be mentioned.

About the lecture

The retable in Huis Bergh (‘s-Heerenberg). Reflections on the possibilities of his style-critical classification in the “Central German” art.

The altarpiece in Huis Bergh (’s-Heerenberg) has been carefully restored, but its artistic peculiarities have so far been rarely appreciated. The author attempts to narrow down the place of origin, which is to find probably in the nowadays ‚Länder‘ Thuringia or western Sachsen-Anhalt. In doing so, he particularly addresses the fundamental question of the possibilities of dating and localization by style-critical methods. This in particularly with regard of the fact that the ideas about the composition of workshops, the status and role of the „masters“ and their profession (painting or sculpture?) have changed significantly.

On the one hand, the question of an artist’s identity, which used to be shaped by the idea of genius, meanwhile is recognized as having much less relevance. On the other hand this also concerns the idea of a „Kunstlandschaft“ that was imagined as a constant and autochthonous development. And this is especially true in the regions and cities of Central Germany with their numerically very high, but artistically often „average“ production in the times of the art boom shortly before the Reformation.

A collaboration of Castle Huis Bergh with: