From Care for the Hereafter to Care in the Here and Now. Ceiling Painting for South German Confraternities in the Age of Catholic Enlightenment

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how the representatives of the Catholic Enlightenment knew to use the existing social structures of contemporary confraternities for their own intentions of reform. This analysis focuses on the eminent role played by the Diocese of Augsburg. The theologians most responsible for this endeavor were Joseph, Landgrave of Hesse in Darmstadt, elected Prince-Bishop of Augsburg in 1740, and two of his closest counsellors, his private secretary Giovanni Battista de Bassi and the Canon Regular Eusebius Amort from Polling. Quite remarkably, their aims accord with the subject matter of new ceiling decoration
in the brotherhoods’ churches, commissioned around the mid-18th century. Serving as evidence for this fact are the frescoes (1749–1754) by Johann Baptist Zimmermann in the pilgrimage church Zum Gegeißelten Heiland in the Wies church, which concentrate entirely on Christological devotion, as do the frescoes (1774) by Johann Joseph Anton Huber in the parochial church of St. Nicolas in Unterdiessen. Another goal of the reformers—to help the needy by means of the brotherhoods—is significantly reflected in the frescoes (1764/65 and 1783) by Christian Thomas Wink in the parochial church of Haag on the Amper.