Law nad Gospel; Ostrava; Mural Paintings; Reformation; Confesionality; Moravia; Sixteenth Century

The town of Moravian Ostrava owned by the Olomouc bishops, developed during the 16th century multi-confessional urban society demonstrating by its character the complicated religious situation in the Bohemian Lands. The interior of Ostrava St. Wenceslaus parish church was decorated in 1555 with wall paintings: One of them representing an Allegory of the Old and New Testaments and of Sin and Salvation. The iconography of the painting was inspired by the Lutheran iconography of the Law and Gospel illustrating Martin Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. However, the Ostrava painting varies greatly from the original Lucas Cranach iconography. The author of the iconographic conception of the Ostrava allegory can be hypothetically identified as the Ostravian Catholic priest Jan Jilovský who was known to have served the local aristocracy sub utraque specie. Iconography of the allegory inspired by the Law and Gospel might well have been also a result of the priest’s poor theological knowledge and of the chaos of orthodoxy. Jilovský would seem to have been one of those “confused and married” priests about whom the Olomouc bishop Marek Khuen complained in his letter of 1561. However, it is possible that the Ostrava allegory may be primarily expressing, under the veil of “tolerated” Utraquism, the Lutheran idea of justification by faith, in a way that would not be obvious in a bishopric church. Such an original, unusual and compromise iconographical presentation was tolerable for the Ostrava bourgeois as well as for the aristocracy – of Catholic as well as of Utraquist and/or Lutheran confession. The allegory is not polemic but rather represents rare evidence in the field of Fine Arts of not only the religious transformation, chaos and orthodox vagueness but also coexistence and tolerance “by necessity” in the 16th Bohemian Lands especially in Moravia.