Master Theodoric

Biography

The main document about Master Theodoric is dated 28 April 1367. On that day Emperor Charles IV freed the painter’s court and his fields in the village of Mořina from taxes and other charges. The privilege extended to his heirs, and it was granted for the decoration of the royal chapel at Karlštejn. In the charter Theodoric is called “our painter and familiar” (pictor noster et familiaris).

Almost everything else has to be inferred from indirect evidence.

His birthplace is unknown: reference works give Italy, but with a question mark. According to another view, he came to Prague from the Rhineland after a study trip to northern Italy in the 1350s. It has also been suggested that his ancestors may have included the sculptor Magister Theodoricus de Alemania, who around 1309 worked at the court of Charles II of Anjou in Naples. There are no documents to confirm this. His birth year is given as “before 1328”, which is more of a guess.

In the list of the Prague painters’ brotherhood, founded in 1346, he is entered as the “first master” with a payment of one groschen. The entry used to be dated to 1348. It is now thought that the honorary position may have been offered to him later, after he painted the royal palace at Prague Castle around 1360. A newcomer, besides, could not join the brotherhood at once: the waiting period for civic rights was three years. In 1359 he is already named as imperial painter (malerius imperatoris) and owner of a house in Hradčany, and the house is mentioned again in 1368. A Hradčany record of the same year, 1359, mentions a certain Theodoricus, nicknamed Zelo. Whether this is the same man has not been proved. If it is, his origin would be Bohemian, but there is no evidence.

The work at Karlštejn went on between 1360 and 1365, although the commission, by one account, had been given as early as 1359. Theodoric’s workshop produced 129 panels (originally 130) in four rows: half-length figures of male saints, female saints and prophets, who represented the “Army of Heaven” and guarded the relics kept in the chapel. Some of the frames had small openings for reliquaries. The panels were made of beech, given a double ground and painted in egg tempera alternating with layers of oil. Separate craftsmen worked on the relief background, the applied details and the tin ornaments. The wings of the Archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation scene are made of strips of tin sheet.

The master’s own hand is recognised in the preparatory brush drawings and in the execution of the best portraits; the rest, judging by the scale of the commission and the time allowed, was painted by assistants whose names nobody recorded. The faces of the saints are modelled with light and shade, not with line as earlier Gothic painting required. Many heads repeat a single pattern so exactly that they might have been traced, yet some show almost individual features. The portrait of St Luke the Evangelist may, it has been suggested, be a self-portrait. To me this hypothesis seems more attractive than testable.

At Karlštejn he is also credited with mural paintings in the window niches. The best preserved is the Adoration of the Three Kings: the Holy Family has a woven wicker fence, the kings wear crowns modelled in relief, and the third king is thought to be a hidden portrait of Charles IV. Theodoric’s predecessor at court was the Master of the Luxembourg Genealogy, who in 1356–1357 painted the imperial palace and the relic scenes in the Chapel of the Virgin Mary; in the Chapel of the Holy Cross he probably made the drawings on the altar wall.

From the workshop, historians suppose, came Master Bertram, later active in Hamburg, the Master of the Třeboň Altarpiece and the painter of the Votive Panel of Jan Očko of Vlašim. The “Soft style” had no direct successors, but later generations of Bohemian Gothic painters worked in an environment that this workshop had created.

Theodoric died early in 1381, before 3 March by one account, before 8 March by another. At that time his court was sold by a letter of Wenceslaus IV, and the buyer was the widow of Ješek Mráz of Lazevice. This document is the only one from which the time of his death is determined, and it is also the basis for the view that he left no descendants.