Vít Vlnas
Famous and phoney – the forefathers of Czech art. Božetěch – Tomáš of Mutina – Zbyšek of Trotina
This article deals with three ‘virtual’ Czech visual artists from the Middle Ages, whose life and work were fabricated during the Enlightenment and the National Revival for purposes of strengthening the arguments of provincial or national patriotism. The first and oldest of these artists, architect and sculptor Božetěch, was a real historical figure – the abbott of the Benedictine monastery at Sázava in the latter half of the 11th century. None of his assumed work has survived and mentions of him in the historical sources are very fragmentary. However (or hence), Božetěch was apostrophized in the 19th and even the 20th century as the patriarch of Czech art. The name of the assumed medieval painter Tomáš of Mutina (13th/14th century) resulted from the mistaken interpretation of signatures on panel paintings preserved at Karlštejn Castle. The painter was actually Tommaso Barisini da Modena (1325/26–circa 1379), a prominent 14th century northern Italian master. While enlightenment scholars were primarily fascinated by the technical aspect of these Karlštejn pictures, erroneously considered to be the first European oil paintings, national romanticism stressed the artist's presumed Czech pedigree. The third of these ‘virtual’ artists, illuminator Zbyšek of Trotina (14th century), was an intentional fraud. His purported signature was inserted into authentic medieval manuscripts together with other glosses around 1820 by Prague National Museum librarian Václav Hanka. Although these had been revealed to be forgeries by the 1870s, even thereafter the fictitious Zbyšek of Trotina enjoyed the attention of fiction writers who saw in him one of the symbols of the ‘Golden Age’ of Charles IV's reign.
design by Bedřich Vémola
