The beginnings of Baldassarre Fontana's work in Moravia : a stucco artist in the service of the Liechtensteins in Valtice and Moravský Krumlov

The study focuses on the early work in central and eastern Europe of the stucco artist and sculptor Baldassare Fontana (1661–1733). It is based on an analysis of archival documents from the Liechtenstein family archive in Vienna and points out for the first time the key role that the Liechtenstein family played in the first years of Fontana's activities in Moravia, and evidently also their fundamental part in his coming here. Based on archival documents and stylistic comparisons, the known catalogue of works by Baldassare Fontana is extended with the stucco decoration of the portal of the chapel dedicated to the plague patrons St. Sebastian, St. Roch and St. Rosalia in the Church of St Bartholomew in Moravský Krumlov, the seat of the Moravian Liechtenstein secundogeniture. It places the commission from Maximilian Jakob Moritz von Liechtenstein (1641–1709) into the context of the activities of other artists active in Moravia at the end of the 1680s. It also gives attention to Fontana's no longer extant commissions for Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein (1657–1712) at the château in Valtice. Although these Valtice works by Baldassare Fontana have not survived, analysis of the documents allows us to reconstruct the artistic networks in which this stucco artist and his collaborators moved, and to better understand the meanings of various places with specific local and cultural parameters within Fontana's work.