Workshops and Patrons of St. Theobald in Thann

The sculptural decoration of St. Theobald in Thann is among the most spectacular of 14th-century enterprises. Overflowing with hundreds of figures, it vividly displays the Life of the Virgin and the Creation. This book focuses on the interaction between design, workshop organization, and art patrons. In the first part the author reconstructs the contractor operation that enabled the production of mass-sculpture by the Parler workshops in Thann, Ulm, Augsburg, and Freiburg. The second part of the book provides a detailed monograph of the Thann west façade and its idiosyncratic narratives. Working from an interdisciplinary approach, the author presents for the first time an essential and in-depth study of the local sculpture, uncovering the political propaganda and ideologies that animated its execution, as well as its unique Middle High German sources. Seeing the process as a sequence of choices, and with the aid of carefully chosen illustrations, he skillfully demonstrates how the two sets of intentions of the dual – lay and ecclesiastic – patrons were delicately interwoven into a coherent program; and how the differences in gender of the patrons yielded various modes of power representation.