Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
John of Kastav
Croatian, Slovene; 15th-century
Hrastovlje, Slovenia: Hrastovlje 19a
86%
Interior of the Holy Trinity Church. 1490. Frescoes
An obscure masterpiece of European art, tucked away in a small town's old church deep in the Dinaric Alps. A portion of its aesthetic significance lies in its completeness. The artist seems to have decorated each available inch of the church's interior; you are awash in color (earthy reds and greens, heavenly golds) as soon as you enter. Another portion lies in the correspondence, structural as well as semantic, between its many scenes: the arc of a body in one panel might be balanced by the crook of the body in an adjoining one; the fullness which Christ's mandorla imposes on one scene will be released by the openness of the picture beside it. John of Kastav was essentially medieval: these are flat, schematic, symbolical images. Yet there is an effect which their density and, in surround, their chromatic richness produces that conveys nothing but the vague fact of some holy presence. (TFS, 2025)