The pulpit of St. Mary's church in Bergen was donated by the German Hanseatic merchants to their parish church in Norway. The pulpit dates back to 1676. The artists are unknown. It is an exceptional case within Norwegian Baroque church furnishing because of its design and polychromy. While the construction itself does not deviate from the style of the Lutheran Renaissance pulpits, the adornments of fruit festoons and acanthus foliage as well as the nine sculptural representations of virtues are distinctly baroque. The ceiling and the bottom side of the pulpit are decorated with acelestial hemisphere, which is unique to this very pulpit. The polychromy shows a variety of techniques imitating precious materials like marble, tortoise shell and the glittering surface of gemstones. Even coloured copperplate engravings are part of the decoration. In this Bachelor thesis, some of these techniques are presented, compared with historical instructions of art techniques and correlated with the iconographic program of the pulpit.
«
The pulpit of St. Mary's church in Bergen was donated by the German Hanseatic merchants to their parish church in Norway. The pulpit dates back to 1676. The artists are unknown. It is an exceptional case within Norwegian Baroque church furnishing because of its design and polychromy. While the construction itself does not deviate from the style of the Lutheran Renaissance pulpits, the adornments of fruit festoons and acanthus foliage as well as the nine sculptural representations of virtues are...
»