National Gallery of Slovenia

Janez Vurnik Jr.

(Radovljica, 1849−1911)

Madonna and Child
1878, marble, 70,5 x 52 x 40 cm
signed and dated lower back: VURNIK / JANEZ II. / 1878.

NG P 608, National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana

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Sculptor Janez Vurnik Jr. learned his art in his father’s workshop. In 1877 and 1878 he worked for the sculptor Carl Steinhäuser in Laas, Tyrol, where he trained mainly in working with marble. After his father’s death in 1889, he took over his large stonemason’s workshop. The workshop produced church furnishings, altars, church sculptures and tabernacles, mostly in the neo-Renaissance style. Among others, the workshop furnished churches in Bled, Brezje, Ljubno, Črnomelj, Gozd pri Kamnik, Ljubno ob Savinji, Nazarje, Nova Štifta pri Gornji Grad, Palčje pri Pivka, Radovljica, Ribno pri Bled, Trnje pri Pivka, Škofja Loka and Brezje pri Mošnje.

Madonna and Child was created during Vurnik’s training with the sculptor Steinhäuser in Laas and is made of Tyrolean marble. The triangular composition reproduces Renaissance stylistic elements.

ABOUT THE PERIOD

Biedermeier and Romanticism

Heavily censored public life between the Congress of Vienna and the Spring of Nations in 1848, weakened Church patronage, and the ascending middle class marked the era when life focused on the privacy of the family circle, individual dignity and the sense of belonging; this is expressed in the Central European art as the style of Biedermeier which coexisted with a Romantic view of nature.

Portraiture was the genre of painting that saw its heyday in this era. Matevž Langus, Jožef Tominc, Mihael Stroj and Anton Karinger established themselves as individually formed portraitists who demonstrated their self-confidence as artists also through their self-portraits. The painters initially relied on formal characteristics of Neoclassicism. Stroj’s late portraits and particularly those by Karinger abandoned the Biedermeier manner and adopted a more realistic approach.

Interest in landscape first appeared as the background of portraits; towards the mid-century first autonomous city vedute emerged. The Biedermaier landscape is idyllic, descriptive, and furnished with staffage figures. Painters were attracted by tourist destinations and locations that were related to homeland identity: Mt. Triglav, Lake Bohinj, Bled. Anton Karinger and Marko Pernhart established themselves as explicit landscapists. The latter became famous for his multi-part panoramas from mountain peaks.

Still lifes became an attractive decoration of a middle-class home, and they also found favour with amateur women painters, one of whom was Countess Maria Auersperg Attems.

ARTISTS

Owner	Birth - death
Anonymous	-
Marija Auersperg Attems	(Graz, 1816−1880)
Friedrich Gauermann	(Miesenbach, 1807 – Vienna, 1862)
Anton Karinger	(Ljubljana, 1829–1870)
Pavel Künl	(Mladá Boleslav, 1817 – Ljubljana, 1871)
Franz Kurz von Goldenstein	(Sankt Michael im Lungau, 1807 − Baden bei Wien, 1878)
Matevž Langus	(Kamna Gorica, 1792 – Ljubljana, 1855)
Henrika Langus	(Ljubljana, 1836−1876)
Ernst Christian Moser	(Graz, 1815−1867)
Marko Pernhart	(Mieger bei Völkermarkt, 1824 − Klagenfurt, 1871)
Georg Johann Seitz	(Nuremberg?, 1810 − Vienna, 1870)
Mihael Stroj	(Ljubno, Radovljica, 1803 – Ljubljana, 1871)
Wilhelm Ternite	(Neustrelitz, 1786 – Potsdam, 1871)
Jožef Tominc	(Gorizia, 1790 – Gradišče nad Prvačino, 1866)
Cornelis Johannes van Hulstijn	(Jutphaas, 1813 – Celje, 1879)
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun	(Paris, 1755–1842)

1820–1870

Janez Vurnik Jr.

(Radovljica, 1849−1911)