Abstract
The visual culture of the Ore Mountains region (Krušnohoří) in the 13th to the 16th century has been the subject of focused academic research over the last two decades. These efforts will culminate in late 2015 with a comprehensive exhibition in the National Gallery in Prague.
The book Trans montes is a forerunner to that exhibition. The book's title makes reference to the model of open cultural exchange in an artistic region whose boundaries do not respect those of modern nation states.
It attempts instead to accentuate the phenomena and factors that connected the areas on the north and south sides of the Ore Mountain range in a web of many and various relationships. As a result of these, the Ore Mountain border region in the 15th and 16th centuries in particular gained such a distinct identity that the traditional ties to the centre of the Bohemian kingdom became of secondary importance.
Today we have a wide range of tools and approaches with which to research the visual culture of the region in question. They are described in the introductory chapter, entitled Josef Opitz...
The methods described are then brought to bear in the rest of the book, which is the work of 20 authors. The book draws primarily on objects of artistic heritage that have been preserved in north-western Bohemia, although in many cases there are profitable forays into questions of the art of the Saxon Ore Mountains or of the Czech lands as a whole, as well as the use of Central European perspectives to cast light on the subject.
On the other hand there are also more narrowly-focused monographic studies looking at partial themes from the angle of cultural history and from the angles of style, geography and iconography. The book thus complements the catalogue of the forthcoming exhibition both in terms of its supra-regional crossovers and in terms of depth of specialisation, something for which there will be more limited space in the exhibition.