PS18

A "Venetian" Discalced Carmelite Church in Habsburg Lands

Helena Seražin
Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Instute of Art History, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The Discalced Carmelite Order (O. C. D., established in 1593) was one of the counter-reformational orders which spread Roman Catholicism across the Protestant German lands in the seventeenth century under the protection of the Habsburg dynasty. The O. C. D. seat of the German province was at Cologne, where their first monastery was built in 1622 with the church based on the model of the order's mother church in Rome, Santa Maria della Scala (1606-24) by Carlo Maderno (later known as Santa Maria della Vittoria). The architect of the church "im Dau" in Cologne was fra Carl von St. Joseph (1586-1650); his project of a single nave church with transitional shallow side chapels and domed transept concluded with short presbytery was later used for monastic churches in Prague, Vienna, Regensburg and Graz. In the case of the O. C. D. monastery at Kostanjevica near Gorizia, however, the monastic church was rebuilt in the scond half of the seventeenth century according to the model of the Venetian O. C. D. church of Santa Maria di Nazareth, called Scalzi (1654-89), designed by Baldassare Longhena. This paper will propose an explanation for what caused the change in the typology of the church in Kostanjevica despite hostility between the Habsburgs and the Serenissima.