Texts in the exhibition „Weltentfaltung. Zeichnungen des Tiroler Barock“

• Introduction
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  The Baroque era was the last epoch of »folk art« that permeated all areas of people’s lives. A sea of folds envelops ecclesiastical and secular spaces in Tyrol, celebrating the redeeming ascension of the human soul in its teeming multitude. In the often deprived Alpine everyday life of the 17th and 18th centuries, these cheerful spaces create a counterworld that unfolds its splendour not to blind people, but to uplift them.

  At the same time, the Baroque represents the last attempt to experience the world as a stable whole. In order to preserve this worldview, Baroque thinking radically transforms the understanding of reality in word and image: humans no longer receive their insights from the world, but rather create their own world from the diversity of human perspectives. This world is articulated in folds, which he brings into it in order to understand it. At the end of the exhibition, the gaze therefore wanders from the fold-filled works of art out into the Alpine world. In its folds, the Baroque interplay of concealment and revelation continues: as in the drawing flooded with folds, nothing is finally decided in this movement. Everything is in flux – art for the present.

  The Grafische Sammlung of the Tiroler Landesmuseen boasts the world’s largest collection of Tyrolean Baroque drawings. It includes many of the finest works produced by Austrian art during this important era. We are highlighting this still largely unknown treasure and presenting an opulent selection of works that showcase the astonishing development of aesthetic splendour and intellectual depth in Tyrolean Baroque art.
• Visibility
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  The following anecdote about artists, which was also widespread in the Baroque period, has been handed down from antiquity: In a competition with his rival Parrhasius, the artist Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds flew over to peck at them. Parrhasius then presented his rival with a painting showing a linen curtain. When Zeuxis impatiently asked him to finally move it aside so that he could see the picture he assumed was behind it, Parrhasius was assured of victory. He had managed to deceive Zeuxis: the curtain was actually painted.

  Such trompe-l’œil curtains were particularly popular in 17th-century Dutch art. Our drawing by Paul Troger, shown opposite, also attests to this popularity in 18th-century Tyrolean art: the viewer’s gaze wanders into the depths of the horizonless space. Only a partially concealed putto arouses suspicion, and the rolled-up structure, a fold, provides clarification: a plane has been drawn into the picture, which can only be recognised as such by what it conceals and by its edges, which form folds.

  Depicting veiled objects in images is one of the common themes in Western art history, as is the apparent veiling of the image itself. But Troger’s drawing reveals something else: not the veiled object or the veiled image, but the veil itself. It is there as a smooth surface, but invisible. The covering remains hidden from us; only the fold and the perspective it creates allow us to perceive what has been in front of us all along, unnoticed: »Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes it visible.« (Paul Klee)
• Folds
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  Like the veiled body and the surrounding world into which it extends, the fold is an independent, beguilingly aesthetic substance. Consider the »Evangelist« by the sculptor Balthasar Horer: his body neither explains the drapery of his robe nor can it be seen through the swarm of folds. Rather, we know it is there. Façades, draperies, stage sets and landscapes also testify to the ubiquity and significance of the fold in the Baroque period. The fold is an obvious symbol of the incessant movement through which the world first presents itself to our notice. Movement does not mean the successive existence of the moving object in different places. Rather, it refers to an inner unity in every moment in which the state resulting from the movement follows »by itself through the force of nature from the present« (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Leipzig 1646 – 1716 Hanover) is regarded as the universal mind of the Baroque era and one of the most important pioneers of the Enlightenment. He observed that »painters and other artists recognise appropriately […] what is done correctly and what is done incorrectly, without often being able to explain the reason for their judgement.« This conceptual judgement, which Leibniz attributes to artists, is also called »implicit knowledge.« The term implicit carries the word »fold« (plicare, Latin for fold, implicite, Latin for entangled, confused) in its name. The world must therefore be discussed, explicated and unfolded before it can be understood. Baroque art shows both: the complex, pre-conceptual folding on the one hand, and the explanatory unfolding of the world on the other. Every statement about the world is itself understood as movement. Truth is not attached to things, applied to them, but is already inherent in them.

  Movement becomes visible in the swarm of folds. It expresses the interplay of forces between the folding and unfolding of the world, between deprivation and gift, concealment and revelation. And so it is not the veiled body of the »evangelist« that we long to reveal before us. Nor do we wish to contemplate a shell that contains nothing. »For neither the covering nor the covered object is beautiful, but rather the object within its covering. If revealed, however, it would prove to be infinitely inconspicuous. […] For there is no other way to describe that object to which, in the final analysis, the covering is essential. Because only beauty and nothing else can be essential in covering and being covered, the divine reason for the existence of beauty lies in mystery.« (Walter Benjamin)
• Perspectives
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  The dome designs by Tyrolean artists exhibited here are overwhelming in their abundance. Their artistic execution is particularly evident when compared to the strictly geometric instructions for the perspectively correct reproduction of a dome in Andrea Pozzo’s »Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum«. Among the imaginative sheets, the drawings by Simon Benedikt Faistenberger stand out. The »impossible architecture« captured on paper in them foreshadows the surreal, multistable shape-shifting of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (Leeuwarden 1898 – 1972 Hilversum). At the same time, it leaves what we see in Andrea Pozzo far behind – Faistenberger is known to have owned a copy of the »Perspectiva«.

  In his drawings, Faistenberger penetrates to a deep, implicit knowledge of the folded nature of the world. As a display of the »system of the universe« his designs are of great significance. Leibniz illuminates this when he writes: »Among the differences between ordinary souls and spirits […] there is yet another: Souls are generally living mirrors or images of the universe of creatures, while spirits are still images of the deity itself or the creator of nature, capable of recognising the system of the universe and imitating something of it through architectural patterns, each spirit being like a small deity in its own domain.«

  But this multi-perspective architecture, viewed through the artist’s eye, which is like that of a »small deity« unfolds in Faistenberger’s work only in his drawings and exists solely in his designs. In his architectural execution, however, he returns to the pure doctrine of Andrea Pozzo: he pragmatically reduces diversity to the simplicity of a single perspective.
• Movement
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  Thinking in folds is directly expressed in the flowing forms, folds, volutes, spirals and ornamental curved lines of Baroque art and architecture. In architecture, the fold even appears in the building’s material: as veining in smoothed marble, which bears witness to the folds preserved in the stone. And what porous travertine is to Roman Baroque, the ubiquitous fractal, the self-similar texture of Höttinger Breccia, is to Innsbruck.

  The towers, constructed from Höttinger Breccia, rise above the folded church façade. The sound of their bells echoes in the folds of the Nordkette, in the places where the Breccia is quarried. This mutual reaction is expressed, mediated by a folded membrane, »in certain vibrations […], such as those noticed on a taut string when touched, in such a way that it emits a kind of musical tone.« (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz)

  This tonal vibration is translated into movement in the artwork using pictorial means. Baroque works reveal to us the constant movement of folding and unfolding in the world, the dialectic of concealment and revelation, withdrawal and gift, veiling and unveiling. This is why Baroque art is also, but not only, an erotic art – and a distant mirror of our postmodern present.
• Artistic landscape
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  The art scene in Tyrol in the first half of the 17th century was dominated by immigrant artists, including Paul Honegger, who came from Swabia. His drawing from 1622 shows how receptive he was to the works of Jacopo Ligozzi from Verona, who was active in the circle of late Florentine Mannerists.

  The second half of the 17th century was dominated by three Tyrolean artist families, namely the Schor, Gumpp and Waldmann families. Further commissions were awarded to mostly Bavarian artists such as Johann Andreas Wolff and Cosmas Damian Asam.

  With the extinction of the Tyrolean line of the Habsburgs in 1665, court commissions declined. From then on, Tyrol’s fortunes were largely determined from Vienna. Nevertheless, local artistic creativity did not decline. Instead, stylistic diversity in Tyrol seemed to flourish precisely because there was no artistic centre. Numerous parish churches, abbeys and chapels of secular residences needed to be furnished. The creators of this splendour in the 18th century, such as Paul Troger, Josef Ignaz Mildorfer and Martin Knoller, influenced art far beyond Tyrol.

  Most of the works shown here refer to a purpose outside themselves, such as their execution as paintings, frescoes, architecture or sculptures. This does not diminish their artistic value; on the contrary, the artistic impulse appears to us in the unadulterated gesture of the drawing as a completely original artistic event. Today, we regard these precious sheets as autonomous works of art.
• Concealment and Unveiling
  

  © TLM/Fotografie: Johannes Plattner

  Whilst the first room of the exhibition celebrates the richly folded covering of the human body, in the last room we encounter Cain, the naked fratricide. It seems as if this adversary of the God-given order has stepped out of the folds with his atrocity. And yet here, too, we encounter a folded space bathed in twilight, created by Josef Ignaz Mildorfer’s chiaroscuro painting. Johann Georg Dominikus Grasmair’s bold nude simultaneously opens our eyes to the folded landscape of the human body.

  The earliest work in the exhibition is Paul Röpfl’s 1610 map of the Karwendel mountain range, drawn on creased sheets of paper. From here, visitors‘ gaze wanders from the window of the exhibition room to the mountain folds of the Nordkette. Like the figures in Röpfl’s hidden object picture, who point in the direction of their respective perspectives, visitors to the exhibition become aware of their own perspectives, their fragmentary updates of the world in the universally folded space: »The revelation of being becomes such only in the overcoming of concealment. So truth is not simply the unconcealedness of being, whereby the former concealment would be left behind somewhere, but rather the revelation of being is necessary in itself as the overcoming of concealment; concealment belongs essentially to unconcealedness – like the valley to the mountain.« (Martin Heidegger)

  The perspective view from the window confirms the relevance of Baroque art. Of course, in the Anthropocene, as a result of man-made climate change, even the structure of the mountain range is in danger of collapsing. Nevertheless, the landslide also reveals its open nature to us, as can be studied in the boulders of the Höttinger Breccia. Incompleteness wherever we look – art for the present.