Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Austrian
16th-century
Ljubljana, Slovenia: National Gallery of Slovenia
75%
Monstrance. 1551. Silver and gilded silver
This monstrance recalls a similar one — a masterwork — by Pertoldus in the collection of the Met Cloisters. That piece is much more finely and completely embellished with images carved and engraved than this one, which is what makes it so exceptional. Specifically, the confluence and occasional dissonance between that work's pictorial components (themselves of varying visual types) and its soaring, sinuous, airy, delicate, open, clustered decorative elements in three dimensions, is what makes it such a stunner. Apart from some pictures at its base and a frieze of figures rimming its stem, this monstrance lacks pictures, so it lacks that crucial tension that animates Pertoldus's. However, as sculpture alone this object is worth contemplating: it tries and fails at every turn to enclose its many negative spaces, though what's positive seems only ever tenuously to be of any substance. Physically, there seems to be less there than there is, which amounts spiritually to much more. (TFS, 2025)