Wwhat is that? It has the Gothic dimensions: 155 centimeters high and thus almost life-size for the fifteenth century, with a very slim waist of only 21.5 centimeters. It is drawn in black ink on parchment and dated around 1495. Its inventory number is “bade-1-1”, which refers to the Strasbourg master builder Hans von Baden and, as an abbreviation, to the collection of top-class architectural drawings of the Technical University of Munich. In 1924, the Extraordinarius for Architecture Hans Karlinger attributed the drawing to Hans von Baden with conviction. It is a late Gothic so-called tower plan, with the verb to tear being synonymous with “to draw” around 1500 – Dürer’s maxim, for example, was to “tear art out of nature”.
This late Gothic tower plan, which is important for art history because it is rare and consists of four parchment parts put together, is also to be counted as looted art like the Benin bronzes. Almost eighty years after the end of the war, German museums and collections are still missing works of art that “got lost” in the turmoil of the last days of the war. These works of art should not be regarded as normal commercial goods, as ownership remains with the original museums and institutions – only theft is usually time-barred. For this reason, auction houses, art dealers and various art foundations often try to find a compromise and return the works that are virtually unsaleable because they are often well known in the art world.
Disappeared in a private collection
“A normal purchase price cannot be paid – usually it is ten to fifteen percent of the estimated value and this ‘finder’s fee’ can also reach considerable sums,” reveals Martin Hoernes, Secretary General of the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, to whom several such art foundations have been awarded in recent years The most spectacular of these were certainly the five paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Holbein, Hals and Brueghel that were stolen from Friedenstein Castle in Gotha in 1979 and presented as masterpieces recovered in a triumphant exhibition.
In the case of the particularly ornate late Gothic tower plan that has now been rediscovered, one can compare the insurance values of museum exhibits and the purchase price of the plan plan of the Minster tower from 1430, which was acquired for Freiburg in 2018. An estimated value of a few hundred thousand euros is quite possible for such rare testimonies of medieval construction, the compromise payment determined from this is still high. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate and sensible, because the crack had already appeared in the auction trade in 2012 and after an intervention by the Technical University of Munich, to whose collection of epochal architectural drawings it belonged until 1945, it once again disappeared without a word into a private collection. This time, ten years later, it was possible to secure the medieval treasure for the public.
Because medieval draft plans for towers are rare in Germany, only about thirty plans have been preserved, five or six of them in Freiburg alone and just as many in Ulm. However, it is not a building plan in the concrete sense, rather a showpiece that should convince a potential client. Therefore, the plan is also “context-free” without inscriptions such as dimensions or location in the church building. Currently only three to four such “puzzle cracks” are known. The only thing that seems certain is that the crack can be dated after Ulrich von Ensingen’s Ulm Minster tower and that of its counterparts in Freiburg and Esslingen, with similarities to details of the Regensburg Cathedral.
Of course, an attribution to the master builder family of the Ensingens, star architects of the Gothic style for at least three generations, is tempting, but stylistically there are some arguments against it. In any case, the former attribution of the architectural collection to Hans von Baden is no longer reliable: the framing of the crack last week has shown that there is no written evidence of this on the reverse, as would have been expected after the TU inventory of 1924 Baumeister finds. So it stays with the stylistic approximation, because an identifiable signature does not show the tower plan. His draftsman used compasses and rulers for the large architectural forms, but all details and decorative forms such as crabs, finials and whorls are executed freehand, but cannot be attributed to their peculiarities. One can therefore be very excited about the expected research results.
