Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, London
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, London
Van Dyck painted this work shortly before his permanent move to England. From Rubens he took strategy rather than style: the understanding that myth could serve politics, and that careful ambiguity could carry force without giving offence. Rubens showed him how to move within courts; Van Dyck learned to speak their language through restraint, allegory, and a beauty that was never merely decorative.
The subject comes from Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), an epic of Christian warfare, erotic entrapment, and spiritual crisis. Rinaldo, the young crusader, lies asleep in Armida’s arms. His mission in the First Crusade, the recapture of Jerusalem, has been forgotten under the spell of pleasure. Sent to destroy him, she has instead fallen in love, turning her task into a kind of willing captivity. Van Dyck captures the moment just before interruption: Rinaldo still entirely seduced, while Carlo and Ubaldo, his fellow knights, emerge quietly through the brush, signalled only by the glint of polished iron on the left.
Tasso’s poem has often been read as a clash between East and West, or as a morality tale of seduction and rescue. Van Dyck is drawn to something subtler: the texture of drift, how purpose slips away, how resolve softens, how a man forgets what he set out to do. The painting inhabits delay rather than decision, and asks to be taken in slowly. What matters is the held moment, the spell not yet broken, and the viewer caught, like Rinaldo, between staying and turning back.
Van Dyck’s Orient is quiet, domestic almost, stripped of any theatrical distance. Rinaldo lies entirely passive, his will surrendered as completely as his arms. Armida bends over him with something genuinely tender, her power rooted in what she withholds: time, duty, the promises he has stopped remembering. The danger is not cruelty but softness, and that is precisely what makes the scene linger.
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, LondonAntoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, LondonAntoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Carlo and Ubaldo See Rinaldo Conquered by Love for Armida, 1634–5, Oil on wood, 57 x 41.5 cm, The National Gallery, London
References
Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Behind the locked doors of St Nicholas’ on the morning of 15 September 1524 lay almost everything that the previous afternoon’s iconoclasts had targeted elsewhere in Tallinn: Hermen Rode’s high altar of 1478–1481, the monumental Danse Macabre of around thirty metres attributed to Bernt Notke and his Lübeck workshop and painted around 1500, the silver and altarpieces of the Brotherhood of the Black Heads, and the seven-branched candelabrum donated by the merchant Hans Bouwer in 1519.
According to a tradition codified in the early twentieth century by Estonian scholar Leonid Arbusow, the church’s wardens had molten lead poured into the locks on the eve of the riot, sealing the building against the crowd that had stripped the Dominican convent of St Catherine and pushed on into St Olaf’s and the Holy Spirit churchес. Of all the Lower Town’s parishes, only St Nicholas’ kept its doors closed against the iconoclasts. The Holy Spirit church, which still holds Bernt Notke’s high altar of 1483 and most of its medieval furnishings, was entered and looted; its art survives only because the town council intervened the next morning and ordered the stolen objects returned to the churches, an act of magisterial restitution that distinguished the Tallinn riot from the more thoroughgoing destruction at Tartu and elsewhere.
The church’s significance in the early Estonian Reformation, however, predates that September day. After Martin Luther’s open letter of September 1523 ‘To the chosen, dear friends of God, all Christians in Riga, Reval (Tallinn)and Dorpat (Tartu) in Livonia’, written at the request of the Riga town council and addressed jointly to the Christian communities of the three Livonian Hanseatic towns, Lutheran preaching took root rapidly in Tallinn.
The first reformer in the city, the former monk Johann Lange, began preaching at St Nicholas’ that same year, initially without the council’s permission, while the chaplain Zacharias Hasse took up the pulpit at St Olaf’s in 1524. While many cities of Northern Europe were shaken by uncontrolled iconoclasm, Tallinn’s transition was, after the events of September 1524, comparatively measured. The town council ordered the looted treasures returned to the churches the following day, asserted control over ecclesiastical finances, and instituted a ‘Common Chest’, a centralised treasury for poor relief and clerical salaries, removing the economic basis of the old Catholic establishment without dismantling its buildings or its art. With more radical currents agitating in Tartu, where the furrier-preacher Melchior Hoffmann triggered an iconoclasm in St Mary’s in January 1525, the Tallinn council acted early to confine reform to magisterial Lutheranism and to keep spiritualist and Anabaptist sects out of the Lower Town.
St Nicholas’ became the focal point of this orderly shift. The Lower Town adopted the new doctrine in stages from 1524 onwards, and in 1533 Tallinn formally joined the Wittenberg Reformation alongside Riga and Tartu. The Upper Town, Toompea, protected by its chapter and the Harju-Viru vassals of the Livonian Order, remained Catholic for nearly four decades longer. The Latin mass continued in the St Mary’s cathedral and the order’s churches until the city surrendered to King Erik XIV of Sweden in June 1561, at which point the new ruler confirmed evangelical preaching and forbade the mass even in the remaining convents. The contrast between the two halves of the city was therefore as much jurisdictional as confessional. Toompea answered to the Order and the bishop, the Lower Town to its Lübeck-law council, and the religious frontier between them ran along the same line as the older medieval one between nobility and burghers.
The early role of the Lower Town’s churches in promoting vernacular preaching, translating Scripture, and founding schools helped to lay the groundwork for Estonian literacy. St Olaf’s opened a public library in 1552, the first in the city. Several reformers who had studied at Wittenberg, in continuity with Luther’s ‘Letter to the Mayors and Aldermen of all the Cities of Germany’ of 1524, also worked to extend instruction to local Estonian boys, and the city schools that grew out of these efforts produced, over the following century, the first generation of Estonian-speakers literate in their own language.
Niguliste kirik (St. Nicholas’ Church) Niguliste kirik (St. Nicholas’ Church), Tallinn The gravestone of Alexander I von Essen (1594–1664) and Magdalena von Ungern (1605–1659), Niguliste, Tallinn
References
Saaret, T. (2014) Niguliste kirik – St Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstimuuseum
Kodres, K. (2003) ‘Church and Art in the First Century of the Reformation in Estonia: Towards Lutheran Orthodoxy’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 28(3–4), pp. 187–203. Available at:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03468750310003668 (Accessed 16 May 2025)
Kurisoo, M. (2016) ‘Continuity and Change: Reorganizing Sacred Space in Post-Reformation Tallinn’, in Kaljundi, L. and Lehtonen, T. M. S. (eds) Re-forming Texts, Music, and Church Art in the Early Modern North. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (Crossing Boundaries: Turku Medieval and Early Modern Studies), pp. 311–356. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/28440373 (Accessed: 15 May 2025).
Kurisoo, M. (2015) Rode altar. Tallinna Niguliste kiriku peaaltari retaabel / Rode Altar. Altarpiece of the High Altar of Tallinn St Nicholas’ Church. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstimuuseum. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/17619292 (Accessed: 14 May 2025).
Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn
Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn
In February 1613, after fifteen years of civil war, famine, foreign occupation and dynastic collapse, the Zemsky Sobor, a national assembly of boyars, clergy, service nobility and townsmen, elected a sixteen-year-old boy as tsar of Russia. Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (22 July 1596 – 23 July 1645) was neither a brilliant political mind nor an obvious candidate. His chief qualification was genealogical: through his great-aunt Anastasia Romanovna (c. 1530–1560), the first wife of Ivan IV (1530–1584) and mother of Tsar Feodor I (1557–1598), he could claim kinship with the extinct Rurikid line. One contemporary boyar reportedly endorsed the choice on bluntly pragmatic grounds: the boy was young, he was tractable, and he would suit their purposes. The real political authority would arrive six years later, when Mikhail’s father, Patriarch Filaret (born Feodor Nikitich Romanov, c. 1553–1633), returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and assumed the role of co-sovereign, steering the state until his death.
This portrait, held in the Peter the Great House Museum in Tallinn, likely derives from a prototype produced in the Kremlin Armoury workshops in Moscow, where monk-iconographers created the earliest known examples of a transitional genre known as the parsuna (from the Latin persona): secular portraits of lay individuals rendered in the visual language of Orthodox icon painting. Frontal in pose, hieratic in stillness, and largely emptied of psychological depth, the parsuna occupied an uncertain space between sacred image and political document. The Kremlin Armoury painters, trained as iconographers and typically anonymous, brought to portraiture the same conventions they applied to images of saints: shallow perspective, symmetrical composition, and an emphasis on symbolic attributes over individual likeness. Authority was conveyed through costume, insignia and posture, and the resulting image was less a record of a face than a declaration of rank.
Whether the Tallinn painting is an original or a copy is not straightforwardly resolved, and the question turns in part on what ‘original’ means within a genre designed for official replication. Some accounts describe it as the earliest surviving seventeenth-century portrait of Mikhail, while others treat it as the earliest known surviving copy, probably at one or more removes from a lost Kremlin prototype rather than a primary image produced from life. In the context of Muscovite diplomatic portraiture, this distinction may be less stable than it first appears. The parsuna tradition produced images intended for controlled circulation and faithful reproduction: a copy sanctioned by the Armoury workshops and distributed through diplomatic channels carried a form of authority that a modern art-historical vocabulary, built around notions of autograph primacy, struggles to accommodate.
The provenance of the Tallinn painting passes through Adam Olearius (1599 or 1603–1671), the German scholar, mathematician, geographer and librarian who served as secretary to the diplomatic embassy sent by Frederick III, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp (1597–1659), to Moscow and Safavid Persia between 1633 and 1639. His route took him through Reval (Tallinn ) on both the first embassy of 1633–34, dispatched to secure the tsar’s permission to travel through Russian territory, and the second of 1635–39, which aimed to negotiate overland trade agreements with the Shah. Though the commercial mission failed, the vast body of ethnographic, geographical and political observations Olearius gathered during six years of travel resulted in The Much-Desired Description of the New Oriental Journey (1647), one of the most influential early modern European accounts of Muscovite court life and society.
The Brotherhood of the Blackheads, an association of unmarried merchants, ship-owners and foreign traders active in Reval (Tallinn) from the early fifteenth century, acquired the portrait from Olearius. This purchase fits within a broader collecting tradition: from the seventeenth century onwards, the Brotherhood accumulated full-length state portraits of European and Russian rulers, among them a painting of Gustav II Adolph, King of Sweden (1594–1632), donated in 1639 and now considered one of the earliest in the collection. Whether these portraits served as diplomatic intelligence, political signalling or civic prestige (or some combination of all three) is worth asking, because the Mikhail portrait arrived in a city that had very particular reasons to scrutinise the face of the Russian tsar.
Decades after the Livonian War (1558–1583), which had devastated the region, the image of the new Russian tsar carried particular weight in Tallinn. The city had twice withstood Russian sieges, in 1570–71 and again in 1577, during which members of the Blackheads themselves had taken up arms in defence of the walls. The Time of Troubles (c. 1598–1613) had temporarily weakened Moscow, but the election of a new tsar and the founding of a new dynasty signalled renewal. Amid continuing power struggles between Sweden, Poland and Russia for control of the Baltic, the portrait registered both recent trauma and a rising awareness of Moscow’s reviving ambitions.
Mikhail’s gem-studded robes function in the painting less as garments than as sacral vestments, proclaiming sanctity, wealth and cosmic order. His features are idealised, and the overall effect is closer to an icon than to any portrait tradition familiar to Western European viewers. This was deliberate. The title tsar, a Slavic rendering of Caesar, had been formally adopted at coronation by Ivan IV on 16 January 1547, in a ceremony staged in the Cathedral of the Dormition and designed by Metropolitan Makary to assert Muscovite succession from the Roman emperors through Constantinople. The ideological groundwork was older still. Ivan III (1440–1505) had married Sophia Palaiologina (c. 1455–1503), niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI (1405–1453), adopted the double-headed eagle as his emblem, and begun styling himself as tsar. Around 1510, the monk Filofei of Pskov articulated the doctrine in a letter to Vasily III (1479–1533): two Romes had fallen, a third stood in Moscow, and there would be no fourth.
By Mikhail’s reign, this invented continuity was thoroughly embedded in the visual rhetoric of tsarist portraiture. The frontal pose, the absence of any spatial depth, the rendering of costume as armour-like encasement rather than draped cloth: all of these choices enforced the idea of the tsar as a figure outside time, continuous with a sacred imperial tradition stretching back through Byzantium to Rome. Some historians have argued that the Muscovite political model was itself a hybrid, combining Byzantine sacred kingship with administrative and fiscal structures inherited from the Tatar-Mongol period, though this thesis remains contested. What is less debatable is that the resulting court culture struck Western European observers as exotic and opaque, and that portraits such as this one were designed to sustain exactly that impression.
Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn Unidentified 17th-century artist, Portrait of Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov (1596-1645), c. the 1630s, Oil on canvas, Peter the Great House Museum, Tallinn
References
Cross, A. (2014) In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613–1917). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers
Dunning, C.S.L. (2001) Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press
Halperin, C.J. (1987) Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of François Langlois (1589 – 1647), early 1630s, Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, London
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of François Langlois (1589 – 1647), early 1630s, Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, London
Despite his fame at court and eventual knighthood, Van Dyck always maintained his ties to the broader world of painters, printmakers, and musicians. These were men whose likenesses would often be engraved and circulated—not confined to palaces but appearing in books, albums, and the collections of the intellectuals. These portraits of fellow artists may not have brought him the power or wealth that aristocratic and royal commissions did. Still, they formed a different kind of magnum opus—one rooted in camaraderie, artistic legacy, and a desire to be remembered as one of the liberati.
This portrait, painted in London in the early 1630s, is not merely a charming fantasy but a coded gesture toward a different kind of legacy. Langlois—an engraver, art dealer, publisher, and accomplished amateur musician—was part of the artistic network Van Dyck moved within long before he rose to court painter for Charles I. Their friendship began in Italy, likely in Rome or Florence in the 1620s, and continued through the years as Langlois became an agent for English collectors.
In this painting, Van Dyck abandons the courtly flattery and formal pomp. Instead, he presents Langlois as a savoyard, a wandering shepherd and musician—a playful nod to Arcadian fashion and a disguise allowing greater intimacy. The musette de cour he holds, aristocratic in origin yet pastoral in its symbolism, hints at shared artistic language. The dog at his feet and the theatrical costume do not reduce him to fancy; they animate him as a participant in a living cultural conversation.
Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of François Langlois (1589 – 1647), early 1630s, Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, LondonAntoon van Dyck (1599–1641), Portrait of François Langlois (1589 – 1647), early 1630s, Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 80 cm, The National Gallery, London
References
Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H., 2004. Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
The reformation that came close to destroying the medieval interior of the Pühavaimu kirik had arrived in Tallinn in 1523, a year before the riot that nearly carried it off. The former monk Johann Lange (active in Tallinn from 1523) had begun preaching at Niguliste church in that year, and the chaplain Zacharias Hasse (active in Tallinn also from 1523,) at St Olaf’s church in the same year, both without formal permission and against the resistance of the Dominican community at St Catherine’s church. What lit the fuse was a letter of admonishment from Wolter von Plettenberg (c. 1450 to 1535), Master of the Livonian Order, written in defence of the Dominicans.
On 14 September 1524, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a crowd loyal to the new Lutheran preachers stormed first St Catherine’s and then the the Pühavaimu (Holy Spirit) church , dragging out images and liturgical silver in a brief but fierce outburst of iconoclasm; the wave reached St Olaf’s church the same day. Niguliste church alone was spared, its warden having had the foresight to seal the church doors with molten lead before the rioters arrived. The tumult lasted barely a day. By the morning of 15 September the Tallinn city council, itself sympathetic to reform but anxious to keep the city’s commercial life intact, ordered the looted objects to be returned to the churches from which they had been seized. That the Holy Spirit retained its famous Notke masterpice, and indeed the bulk of its medieval furnishings, owes more to that swift restorative gesture than to any miraculous immunity, and to the fact that the Tallinn reformation took its theology from Wittenberg rather than from Zürich or Geneva. Lutheran practice, unlike its Reformed counterpart, tolerated images so long as they were not made the object of cult, and the Pühavaimu’s medieval interior was therefore reabsorbed into Protestant use with relatively limited losses, and was extended rather than stripped over the following century.
The church was already old when the rioters arrived. A priest of the Holy Spirit is mentioned in 1316, and the building itself appears in written sources in 1319 as the chapel of the Holy Spirit Hospital and Almshouse, an institution serving the sick poor, retired clergy and those who could not be cared for elsewhere. The church does not face due east, an irregularity that has been read as evidence that it was inserted into an already crowded streetscape and had to negotiate with neighbouring plots. Its original entrance arrangement reflects its dual function: a north door opening onto Pühavaimu Street for the city’s parishioners, and a south door opening onto the hospital yard for the residents of the almshouse complex. Constructed of local limestone in a single-nave Gothic plan, the church was enlarged at the end of the thirteenth century with a chancel, and the choir is the oldest surviving part of the structure, with the aisle added in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.
In 1360 the original wooden ceiling was replaced by stone vaulting, the present tower was raised, and the larger Gothic windows with their tracery were inserted. The first record of the tower itself in the city books dates from 1498, when a certain Didrick was paid for gilding and painting its spire. After the catastrophic fire of 1684 the tower was rebuilt with the octagonal stage and Baroque spire that have since become a signature of the lower town’s silhouette, and which, after the further fire of 2002, were restored once more. The Pühavaimu sometimes housed sessions of the Tallinn city council itself, and is for this reason occasionally referred to in seventeenth-century sources as the Town Hall Chapel, a sign of how closely its civic and ecclesiastical functions were bound together.
By the fifteenth century the church had become a central parish for the lower town, valued for its accessibility to townspeople of all ranks. Throughout that century it accumulated the kind of devotional furnishing typical of a prosperous Hanseatic parish. Side altars dedicated to the Holy Cross, the Virgin, Saints Matthias, Bartholomew, Gangulf, Simon and Jude, Anthony, and others were endowed by burghers and confraternities, and pre-Reformation account books record thefts of statuary, silver and vestments significant enough to suggest a richly equipped interior. The bell cast for the church in 1433, still in situ and among the oldest in Estonia, carries a Low German inscription that reads in translation as the boast of a young woman who has woken servant, mistress and master alike and faces no rebuke for it, a rare touch of vernacular humour set into liturgical bronze.
The dominant work of the medieval interior is the high-altar retable produced in 1483 in the Lübeck workshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1440 to before May 1509), the same master whose worksop’s Danse Macabre survives in fragmentary form at Niguliste church. The Tallinn city council appears to have commissioned the work in the early 1480s, and a letter of 1484 from Notke himself, in which the master reminds the council that he has not yet been paid for one “panel”, places its completion firmly within the documentary record. The retable bears the coats of arms of Tallinn rather than those of any individual donor, marking it as a corporate civic commission. Its iconography is precisely tuned to the church’s double identity as a hospital chapel and as a sanctuary dedicated to the Holy Spirit. The opened sculpted corpus shows the Pentecost, where the Virgin and the apostles receive the descent of the Spirit, while the painted wings carry scenes from the life of Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia, the thirteenth-century landgravine canonised for her care of lepers and her renunciation of dynastic wealth in favour of hospital foundation. Recent interdisciplinary research conducted by the Estonian scholars, has clarified the workshop technique, identified later overpainting, and confirmed that healing, here understood as one of the gifts of the Spirit invoked in 1 Corinthians 12, was the theological pivot on which donor, patron saint and architectural setting were aligned.
The Pühavaimu’s distinctive contribution to Estonian cultural memory is linguistic as much as architectural. From 1531, under Johann Koell (active from the 1530s), regular services in the Estonian language began to be held within its walls, the first such provision in any Tallinn church. In 1535 Koell, working with his colleague Simon Wanradt (also active in Tallinn from the 1530s) of Niguliste, produced the bilingual Low German and Estonian catechism that has since been recognised as the earliest known printed text in Estonian. It was set in Wittenberg, almost certainly by Hans Lufft (1495 -1584), the press that had also produced Luther’s German Bible. Its history, however, is a cautionary one. The Tallinn city council, finding the Estonian theology in places at odds with strict Lutheran formulations, ordered the run to be destroyed. Eleven damaged leaves survived only because they had been used as binding scrap inside a later seventeenth-century volume, where they were identified in 1929 by the Baltic-German historian Hellmuth Weiss (1900 -1992). Those eleven leaves now remain in the Tallinn City Archives.
The sixteenth-century pastorate of the Pühavaimu produced a second figure of comparable cultural weight. Balthasar Russow (c. 1536 – 1600), who served the church from 1566 until his death in 1600, composed the Chronica der Provintz Lyfflandt, the most vivid contemporary narrative of the Livonian War and one of the earliest sustained vernacular histories of the region, written by a man who appears to have been of partly Estonian descent. A generation later, between 1600 and 1606, the Pühavaimu’s dean Georg Müller (c. 1570- 1608) delivered and recorded a body of Estonian-language sermons that constitute, by some margin, the largest surviving corpus of handwritten Estonian from before the eighteenth century, now likewise preserved in the Tallinn City Archives. The church was not merely a venue for the first Estonian liturgy; it housed and helped to produce the texts on which the historical study of the language now substantially depends.
The seventeenth-century enrichments visible to a modern visitor accumulated steadily across that century and the next. The carved late-Renaissance pulpit of 1597 is the oldest in Tallinn. The painted galleries, with their biblical cycles executed by several different hands in the mid-seventeenth century, line three sides of the nave, and a sequence of painted epitaphs commemorate the city’s wealthy burgher families across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A double portrait of Luther and Melanchthon, dated to the end of the sixteenth century, hangs in the church and offers an unusually direct memorial of the Wittenberg connection. Taken together, these accumulations make the interior one of the most artistically intact of any Protestant church in Tallinn.
The most interesting of these post-medieval additions is the elaborately carved wooden surround of the public clock on the church’s exterior, a work of the Königsberg-trained sculptor Christian Ackermann (c. 1670-after 1710 ). The clock face dates from 1684, and its surround was carved in the years that followed. The corrected biographical record, established by the Estonian Academy of Arts and the Art Museum of Estonia in their 2016 to 2020 research project, places Ackermann’s arrival in Tallinn in 1674. He had trained in Königsberg and worked in Danzig, Stockholm and Riga before settling in the city, where he found employment first in the Olevimägi workshop of the recently deceased master Elert Thiele. He married Thiele’s young widow Anna Martens, fathered a child by her in conspicuous breach of the prevailing moral norms, and in March 1677 was granted by the city council the unusual right to operate as an independent master without joining the woodcarvers’ guild, becoming the first freelance sculptor in Estonian history. The guild’s complaint that he behaved as if he were Phidias of Athens has given the modern research project its slightly mischievous title, Tallinna Pheidias. Ackermann probably died of plague during the epidemic of 1710, which carried off four-fifths of Tallinn’s population. The clock surround at the Pühavaimu, with its acanthus ornament and its small access door inserted, according to local tradition, so that the keeper could adjust the mechanism without raising a ladder daily, is among the works on which his attribution rests most securely.
Pühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in TallinnPühavaimu kirik in Tallinn
References
Estonian Academy of Arts and Art Museum of Estonia (n.d.) The Investigation of the Works by Bernt Notke. Available at: https://notke.eu/en/ (Accessed: 14 May 2025)
Kodres, K., Kangropool, R. and Mänd, A. (eds.) (2005) Eesti kunsti ajalugu, 2: 1520–1770. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia.
Kreem, T.-M., Hiiop, H., Randla, A., Kröönström, T. and Aaso-Zahradnikova, I. (2020) Christian Ackermann. Tallinna Pheidias, ülbe ja andekas / Christian Ackermann. Phidias of Tallinn, Arrogant and Talented. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstimuuseum and Eesti Kunstiakadeemi
Pinkus, A. and Räsänen, E. (2019) ‘Si grant ardor: Transgression and Transformation in the Pühavaimu Altarpiece’, Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art, 5. Available at: https://differentvisions.org/issue-five/2019/07/si-grant-ardor/ (Accessed: 25 April 2026).
Niguliste Museum (2025) Estonian Book 500: Relics. Exhibition catalogue. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstimuuseum
Toompea is a limestone hill at the centre of Tallinn’s Old Town, and the Cathedral of Saint Mary the Virgin has stood at its top since the Danish conquest of 1219. Consecrated in 1240, it is the oldest church in the city and for centuries served as the seat of the Domkapitel, which held both religious and feudal authority over the hill. It was governed initially by the Bishop of Reval and, from 1346, by the Teutonic Order, which moved into the territory in the wake of the St George’s Night Uprising of 1343, when Danish governance effectively collapsed.
Toompea was a legally and administratively separate territory from the merchant town below, and that separation was maintained by both sides throughout the medieval and early modern period. The two communities had different legal frameworks, different economies, and even different government structure. Toompea was not formally united with the town below until 1877.
The Reformation reached Tallinn in 1523, brought by two preachers from Germany: Johann Lange, a former monk who began preaching at St Nicholas’ Church, and Zacharias Hasse, who took up the pulpit at St Olaf’s. Their presence brought them into conflict with the Catholic clergy almost immediately, and in September 1524 crowds ransacked St Olaf’s, the Holy Spirit Church, and the Dominican church of St Catherine in the Lower Town. The Town Council, which governed the merchant city, sided with the reformers, expelled the Dominicans, and banned Catholic worship within its jurisdiction. Tallinn joined the Wittenberg Reformation formally in 1533, together with Riga and Tartu. Toompea hill had a different story The Town Council held no authority over the hill, which remained under episcopal and Teutonic Order jurisdiction, and the cathedral became a Lutheran church only in 1561, when the city submitted to Swedish rule and the new ruler confirmed free preaching while banning the reading of mass even in monasteries and convents . Under Swedish rule and subsequently within the Russian Empire from 1721, the local nobility retained sufficient internal autonomy for Toomkirik to continue as the ceremonial church of the Estonian Ritterschaft, the knightly estate whose authority remained distinct from the merchant culture of the Lower Town .
The building had developed into a Gothic basilica by the 15th century, and a fire in 1684 destroyed much of the interior, including the tower over the central nave. The reconstruction that followed gave the church its present slightly Baroque character, with a new tower added at the western end of the nave in 1778–79. The most significant furnishings from the post-fire period are by Christian Ackermann (c. 1660–c. 1710): the pulpit of 1686, supported by a carved wooden figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, and the altarpiece of 1696, executed after drawings by Nicodemus Tessin the Younger. A third work from this period is the Golgotha Group, a four-metre crucifix flanked by figures of Mary and John, carved by Heinrich Martens, donated in 1694 by Hermann Rahr, elder of the cathedral guild, and gilded by the painter Lorenz Buchau.
Two monuments predate the 1684 fire and are the most significant in the interior. The sarcophagi of Pontus De la Gardie (c. 1520–1585) and his wife Sophia Gyllenhielm (c. 1556–1583), both carved by Arent Passer (c. 1560–1637) between 1589 and 1595, are regarded as the finest examples of Renaissance sculpture in Tallinn. They were commissioned not by a Baltic noble family but by King John III of Sweden himself. Sophia was his illegitimate daughter by the Finnish noblewoman Karin Hansdotter, and her husband Pontus De la Gardie, born Ponce d’Escouperie in Caunes-Minervois in Languedoc, had risen from Danish mercenary to Swedish baron, receiving his title in 1571 after transferring allegiance to Sweden following his capture during the Northern Seven Years’ War in 1565. He became the leading Swedish military commander in Livonia and it was his forces that stormed Narva in September 1581, in a siege in which around four thousand soldiers and civilians were killed. Sophia died in June 1583 shortly after giving birth to their son Jacob in Reval, and Pontus drowned in the Narva River two years later while returning from negotiations with Russia. Jacob De la Gardie, born in the same city where his parents are buried, went on to serve as Governor of Swedish Estonia from 1619 to 1622 and Governor-General of Livonia from 1622 to 1628, later becoming one of the five regents governing Sweden during the minority of Queen Christina.
The interior holds 107 painted heraldic epitaphs dating from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Although they project a sense of noble continuity, many plaques, especially those commissioned after 1721, were created by much later arrived or newly ennobled families, some of whom employed invented crusader imagery or Romanised heraldry to construct a fictive lineage. The major Livonian and Swedish families who actually shaped and defended the region are, in many cases, nowhere on these walls.
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References
Kala, T. (gen. ed.) (2019) Tallinna ajalugu, vols. I–IV. Tallinn: Tallinna Linnaarhiiv
St Olaf’s Church (Oleviste kirik) in Tallinn dates from the Danish era of the 12th century, when the fortified settlement of Reval came under Danish control following campaigns that pushed the Danish kingdom across the eastern Baltic. The dedication to Olaf II Haraldsson (c. 995–1030), the canonised king of Norway, was a calculated alignment with Scandinavian Christianity and dynastic authority. Olaf’s canonisation at Nidaros in 1031 made him the most prominent royal saint of the North almost immediately, his shrine in Trondheim drawing pilgrims from across Europe. The cult travelled well and adapted to wherever it landed: in Norway he was the Christianising monarch, the national protector; in England he was remembered as King Æthelred II’s ally, the man who helped drive out the Danes from London in 1014; in Iceland sailors invoked him against storms; in Sweden his image was woven into pilgrimage routes around Uppsala and other holy sites. His veneration reached as far as Novgorod, where he slipped into Orthodox calendars under the name Blasius.
In Estonia the picture is less straightforward. That one of Tallinn’s two principal churches bore his name must be read against a background of Scandinavian military dominance, but the saint’s memory was worked over by the people the crusades had conquered. Local legend reversed his sanctity rather than simply ignoring it. One tradition made him a master builder who raised churches by supernatural means, then fell to his death from the very spire he had just completed — a story that fuses Christian miracle with the older folk instinct that pride of this kind ends badly. On Saaremaa, which remained semi-autonomous and a persistent centre of resistance to the crusading orders, stories circulated of Olaf not as a conquering saint but as a captured king, enslaved — the royal dignity stripped away, the oppressor cast as victim. These are not simply colourful variants. They point to a cult that in Estonia carried real friction: Scandinavian authority pressing down on one side, local memory pushing back on the other, the two producing versions of the same figure that barely resemble each other.
The dedication of Oleviste therefore meant two things at once — absorption into the Scandinavian religious order, and the beginning of a local tradition that quietly corroded its official meaning.
The building itself reinforces something of this tension. The Gothic interior is tall, spare and almost aggressively unornamented — vaults rising over a plain nave in a way that feels closer to Protestant austerity than to the richly furnished Catholic interiors that the church once contained. The Reformation, when it came in the 16th century, found a building already inclined towards severity and simply made that severity doctrinal. Today Oleviste remains the most plainly Protestant-looking of Tallinn’s major churches, monumental in height and deliberately lean in decoration: a building shaped as much by what was taken out of it as by what was put in.
St Olaf’s Church (Oleviste kirik) in TallinnSt Olaf’s Church (Oleviste kirik) in TallinnSt Olaf’s Church (Oleviste kirik) in TallinnSt Olaf’s Church (Oleviste kirik) in Tallinn
Mänd, A. 2014. ‘Oleviste kiriku keskaegsest sisustusest ja annetajate ringist’ [On the medieval furnishings and circle of donors of St Olaf’s Church], Acta Historica Tallinnensia, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 3–50. Institute of History, Tallinn University. Available at: https://kirj.ee/public/Acta_hist/2014/acta-2014-20-3-50.pdf [Accessed 12 May 2025].
Workshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , Tallinn
Workshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , Tallinn
This large fragment is the only surviving workshop version after a lost prototype by the master himself. Bernt Notke from Lübeck was one of the foremost artists to translate this widely popular yet now largely vanished theme into monumental visual art.
In this surviving fragment, human life is staged as an unstoppable dance toward death. Figures — the preacher, Death I, Death II, the pope, Death III, the emperor, Death IV, the empress, Death V, the cardinal, Death VI, the king, and Death VII — are linked hand in hand with animated personifications of Death. Each speaks in turn, offering protests or appeals, only to be met with Death’s cold insistence.
Influential theologians of the era, such as Jean Gerson (1363–1429) — particularly in his ‘De Arte Moriendi’ — emphasised that meditation on death was essential not to induce terror but to lead the soul toward humility and repentance. Within this theological framework, death was not merely the end but the decisive moment of judgement toward which the entire life should be consciously directed.
Notke’s iconography reinforces this theological lesson through the physicality of the dance. The figures are not static; they are pulled, staggered, and twisted, suggesting that death is not a distant threat but a force already moving through the course of life itself. The implied musicality of the dance — a dark parody of earthly celebrations — deepens the warning: those who ‘dance’ through life heedlessly are already surrendering to death’s rhythm.
Yet for those who live in awareness and humility, death need not mean despair. The ideal of peaceful acceptance, celebrated in medieval spirituality as part of the ars moriendi — the ‘art of dying well’ — taught that a good death crowns a life of repentance, charity, and inward preparation.
Workshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , TallinnWorkshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , TallinnWorkshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , TallinnWorkshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , TallinnWorkshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , TallinnWorkshop of Bernt Notke (c. 1435–1508), Danse Macabre, after 1493, Oil on canvas, 160x750cm (original work estimated over 30 metres), the Chapel of St Anthony, Niguliste church , Tallinn
Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
When Bernardo Strozzi, a former Capuchin monk from Genoa, arrived in Venice in 1633, he entered a city where music was omnipresent—sacred, theatrical, and increasingly experimental. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was still active at San Marco, shaping the expressive language of early Baroque music. Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) emerged as a defining voice in opera, while Giovanni Rovetta (c. 1595–1668) extended Monteverdi’s legacy. Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), though early in her career, was already part of the city’s dynamic musical and intellectual circles.
The iconography of this sensual portrait reflects a complex Venetian tradition of allegory in early modern art, especially the personification of the creative arts. Music, like Painting, Poetry, or Rhetoric, was often portrayed as an idealised, sensual woman—part muse, part symbol—blending intellectual grace with erotic presence. These figures drew on diverse visual types: the Bella Donna, mythological goddesses like Flora, prophetic Sibyls, and Christian saints such as Cecilia. In all cases, beauty functioned as a metaphor—for inspiration, harmony, divine truth, or refined leisure. The woman here, with her viola da gamba, unfastened gown, and composed gaze, is not a portrait but a visual synthesis of these overlapping traditions: an allegory of music, yes, but also of sensual perception, introspection, and the aesthetic ideals that defined Baroque culture.
It has often been suggested that the painting is a portrait of the composer Barbara Strozzi, but the identification remains speculative. Bernardo Strozzi did paint her father, the poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi (c. 1583–1652), a key figure in Venice’s intellectual and operatic circles, though the two artists were not related, despite sharing a surname. Interestingly, works of such sensual character were often displayed alongside religious paintings in private collections, reflecting the Baroque ability to hold beauty, piety, and desire in harmonious coexistence.
Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, DresdenBernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, DresdenBernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, DresdenBernardo Strozzi (1581-1644), Allegory of Music, Oil on canvas, 126 x 99 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), St Cecilia with the Heads of Valerian and Tiburtius, Oil on canvas, 117 × 97 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from the Museums of Strada Nuova – Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), St Cecilia with the Heads of Valerian and Tiburtius, Oil on canvas, 117 × 97 cm, Kadriorg Museum, Tallinn, on short-term loan from the Museums of Strada Nuova – Palazzo Bianco, Genoa
Strozzi painted this picture in his early forties, in the years when his Genoese contemporaries still called him il Cappuccino. He had entered the Capuchin order around 1599 to 1600, taken full vows, and only obtained a partial release in 1610 to support his widowed mother and unmarried sister. Canonically he remained a friar. The painting belongs to the Genoese decade between that release and his flight to Venice in 1631, after the Capuchins had attempted to force him back into community life and briefly imprisoned him for refusing. The crimson brocade, the heavy silver of the platter, and the warm, rubensian flesh-tones all date the work to the early 1620s, when Genoese collecting was being recast by the long Flemish presence in the city: Rubens had visited in 1604 and 1606, and Van Dyck arrived in 1621 and stayed, with intermissions, until 1627.
Cecilia herself is on uncertain historical ground. The Passio Sanctae Caeciliae, composed in Rome in the late fifth century, supplied the narrative on which all later iconography depends, and the story reached Genoese readers above all through the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1230 to 1298), Dominican Archbishop of Genoa from 1292.
Cecilia, vowed to virginity but married against her will to the Roman patrician Valerian, persuades her husband on their wedding night that an angel watches over her chastity. Valerian agrees to be baptised by Pope Urban I (r. 222 to 230) and returns to find an angel crowning the couple with garlands of roses and lilies. He converts his brother Tiburtius. The two occupy themselves with the burial of executed Christians, are denounced to the prefect Almachius, and are beheaded. Cecilia, sentenced first to suffocation in the overheated caldarium of her own house and then to the sword, is famously not killed cleanly: the executioner fails on three blows, and she lives three days more, dictating her household to the pope as a titulus church. The position of Maderno’s 1599 sculpture under the high altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, with the saint lying face-down and the cut visible at the base of her neck, fixed that detail in seventeenth-century devotional memory.
Strozzi compresses the whole story to a single confrontation. Cecilia stands three-quarter length behind a portative organ, in a heavy crimson and gold brocade. A blond putto twists beside her, raising a sackbut, the slide trumpet that Genoese church orchestras of the 1620s used to double the voices in concerted polyphony, so the instrument is not generic but a precise reference to the music actually heard in the city’s churches in Strozzi’s lifetime. Cecilia’s gaze rises towards a cleft of light at the upper right. Her hands rest on a wide silver platter heaped not with food but with the severed heads of Valerian and Tiburtius, the angel’s wreaths still circling their hair. The platter is no part of the Passio, which has the brothers buried decently; the iconographic shock of presenting their heads to the saint is a Counter-Reformation invention, and Strozzi’s is one of its earliest and most arresting forms.
For an early seventeenth-century Genoese viewer the platter would have carried specific local weight. The cathedral of San Lorenzo had since the late thirteenth century preserved the Sacro Catino, the green hexagonal dish brought back from Caesarea in 1101 by the Genoese fleet of the First Crusade and venerated for centuries as the vessel of the Last Supper, only revealed to be Egyptian glass when Napoleon broke it during its removal to Paris in 1809. The treasury also held the Discoperta, a chalcedony platter on which, by Genoese tradition, the head of John the Baptist was presented to Salome and Herod, paraded annually on the feast of the Baptist on 24 June. The platter on which Cecilia bears the two heads is therefore a direct visual citation of one of the most charged objects in the city’s sacred topography, folding the Roman martyrdom into a Genoese liturgical horizon.
The interpretive crux is the calmness of Cecilia’s face. Around the edges of the canvas the eye registers violence: severed flesh, disordered hair, the cooling weight of two human heads. At the centre, her expression is one of focused listening. Her right hand rests on the rim of the platter without strain. The discrepancy is the painting’s argument. The Counter-Reformation theology that endorsed the visceral display of martyrdom, codified in the decrees on sacred images at the closing session of the Council of Trent in December 1563 and developed by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane of 1582, also required the saint to be shown as already inhabiting the consolation her death secures. Cecilia hears the music we cannot hear, and what she carries weighs, for her, no more than the flowers still crowning her dead.
Voragine, J. de (c. 1260) Legenda Aurea. English trans.: Ryan, W. G. (trans.) (1993) The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press
