The study is devoted to the trio of statues of the founders in the church of the former Benedictine Kastl Abbey. At the time of the origination of the statues, in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, Kastl was situated in immediate proximity to the southern border of the Upper Palatinate, which was annexed to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Soon thereafter, the joining of a new land ruled by the Luxembourg Dynasty and the Kingdom of Bohemia was symbolically reinforced when Charles IV renewed the long vanished title of Duke of Sulzbach and bestowed it on his son Wenceslas. If the statues in Kastl Abbey were in fact related to the Bohemian house of Luxembourgs, they would fit well into the context of the Charlesian depictions of monarchial predecessors in Prague, Karlstein, and Tangermünde. Nonetheless, the kinship with the Karlstein genealogy of Charles IV is not restricted to the ideological level; it is also obvious on the artistic level. The family tree that was completed shortly before the completion of the statues in Kastl Abbey includes exact models of figure types and their court attire. Analogies to the sculptural work can be traced to the 1350’s second-rate pre-Parlerian production in Rhineland and Central Europe. and Aleš Mudra.
The study newly identifies a woman depicted in relief on a sandstone tympanum, walled-in secondarily in building Reg. No. 72 in Tišnov in Moravia. The tympanum can be assigned to the second half of the 1230s or to the 1240s, with its vegetable décor matching in detail a similar motif on the well-known western portal of the church of the Cistercian convent at Porta Coeli at Tišnov. Characteristic features establish the woman as being Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia (1207-1231), a major person in European spirituality of the 13th C., canonised in 1235. This is, then, evidence of very early reception of the new saint in the Czech Lands, clearly inspired by tight dynastic ties: the Czech queen - widow Constance of Hungary, who founded the Porta Coeli convent in 1232, was Elisabeth’s aunt by bloodline. The sculpture is at the same time one of the very oldest artistic depiction of Saint Elisabeth in the European context, with typical accent on the saint’s tight ties to the ideals of Saint Francis of Assisi. Nevertheless, we do not yet know the original location of the tympanum, but apart from the site of Porta Coeli itself the parish church of Saint Wenceslas at Tišnov does fall into consideration. and Jiří Doležel.