Passau: the beautiful baroque city where three rivers meet

Passau is a city in Bavaria, in the south-east of Germany. It is not far from the borders with Austria and the Czech Republic. 

The city has a long history and it stands on the strategically important junction between three large rivers: the Donau (known in many countries as the Danube), the Inn and the Ilz. These rivers join at a point called the drei flüsse eck (three rivers corner) at the end of the promontory on which the old town stands. From there, the river becomes the Donau (Danube).

The town is first mentioned in Roman times and was the residence of a bishop from 739 CE. Bishops became the rulers of the small independent city state of Passau in the 13th century. The town was devastated by fire in 1662 and was rebuilt shortly after, using designs by Italian masters, in the baroque style. Passau became part of Bavaria in 1803 and the baroque had a big influence on Bavarian architecture, even through to the nineteenth century palaces of King Ludwig II.

The most impressive example of this baroque architecture in Passau has to be the Cathedral of St Stephen, in the centre of the old town and surrounded by cobbled alleyways and courtyards. It was designed by Carlo Lurago, with stucco work by Giovanni Battista Carlone and frescos by Carpoforo Tencalla. The overall effect can be seen in the first image above and in these below: the floor and lower parts of the pillars of the nave are fairly sedate, rising overhead to a tumult of colour and form.

The cathedral also houses the Europe's largest cathedral organ.

Even though most of the decorative sculpture is made from stucco (which is a mixture of lime, sand, water and sometimes a binding agent such as horsehair) there is some carving in wood. The organ has carved and gilded decoration and there is a large crucifix and some smaller statues. 

Perhaps the most impressive woodcarving is on the pulpit, which was constructed from carved and gilded lime wood. Designed by Vienna-based Antonio Beduzzi, with figures carved in the workshops of Lorenzo Mattielli, it was made between 1722 and 1726:

This cathedral replaced an earlier, medieval, one which was destroyed in the fire of 1662. Now, one of the few remaining identifiable pieces of the original cathedral is a carving that has become a symbol of the town and is displayed nearby - a large face carved in stone and now known as 'Der Passauer Tölpell'.

As well as the incredible work in the Dom, more beautifully-made pieces could be seen in many of the streets and alleyways around the old town. Some were statues..

...but more impressive to me were the stunning doors leading into many of the houses and courtyards. 

I wonder if these also date to the mid-late seventeenth century?

Revisiting Eggenfelden: my first large woodcarving and the first piece made using chisels, carved and painted over twenty years ago

In the summer of 1995, an international environmental work camp was held outside Eggenfelden in Bavaria. I was the only British person there, with other volunteers from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Slovenia, Poland, Czech republic and Lithuania.

We worked with the LBV (Landesbund für Vogelschutz), a local environmental group, to transform a disused electricity substation into a wildlife sanctuary with spaces for birds and bats to roost. It was a great time, camping in the adjoining field and cooking for each other.

Woodcarving had interested me more and more over the previous year but I'd only produced work using found timber with my Opinel knife up until that point. As the construction project drew towards a close, I asked if it would be okay to carve a date plaque for the building. With a piece of softwood (probably larch), a gouge and two carpenter's chisels donated by the neighbour, the date plaque took shape. I painted it and then fixed it onto the tower. 

With the help of Emmanuelle, a French volunteer, the two metal doors on the structure were  also brightly painted.

At the end of the work camp a small conifer tree was put onto the roof, the traditional way that the end of a building project is celebrated in the area.

At the time, I never got a decent photo of the carved plaque and had always regretted it. The panel was the largest project that I'd worked on for several years afterwards and it was also my first carving made without using my knife. I often wondered if the panel was still there and what it looked like.

So last week, with mounting excitement, I sat in a car travelling along a dusty farm track towards the same spot. The satellite view on Google maps had told me that the building was still there, but were the panel and paintings?

As the car pulled up next to the tower, I pretty much threw myself out and ran round to the other side. There it was, aged but with the colours still visible and the whole panel looking in much better shape than I'd feared!

The painted doors hadn't fared quite as well, with one almost completely faded and rusted away.

However, the birds and bat on the main door were still quite easy to make out. I wonder why someone had gone to the trouble to paint out the blue tit sitting on the fencepost?

It was fantastic to see that the plaque was still there and also that the tower was clearly still very much serving its purpose as a wildlife refuge. 

Chatting with Joachim Seitfudem about the Bavarian woodcarving tradition (and lots of other stuff)

I dropped by today to visit Jo in his studio at The Island in the centre of Bristol. It was great to catch up with him and to see two panels that he has recently carved in the traditional Bavarian style. He learned much of his craft from his father Hans-Joachim Seitfudem, who is a master carver there.

Jo is currently making more contemporary-styled work but said that fancied carving the panels to make sure that he doesn't lose the skills that he learnt in Bavaria from his father.

They are both carved from lime (linden) wood. It's interesting to see how he gets the shapes on the relief panel by cutting planes into the timber; flat surfaces that add up to give the curved surfaces making up the design. He also much prefers a finish that shows the tool cuts, rather than one that is sanded. We agreed that the latter can look very 'plasticky' if done badly.

Jo noted that things tend to be in threes in Bavarian carving (see the three dogs in the panel). He also showed me a small figure that he carved under his father's guidance when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old. His dad gave his a small carving knife and told him to whittle it using that and no other tools. It seems like a good way to learn the importance of working with the wood without relying on your tools to do everything for you.

Against what the general advice to people looking for whittling knives seems to be, I noticed that the carving knife that Jo uses has a sharply curved bevel on both sides, so that it is almost sharpened to have two angles of bevel on each side. It was originally his father's. Usually, the advice in most articles or blogs is that the knife should have a single bevel, sloping from the back to the cutting edge.  My own knife is similar to his in that there is a second, steeper, bevel to the blade. The steep bevels mean that the knife travels naturally out of the cut towards the surface, rather than wanting to travel straight on into the timber. A knife with this steep bevel can do some pretty fine work too:

We also had an interesting chat about the guild system in Bavaria. Woodcarvers have a guild system there, like carpenters and many other traditional trades. The carvers can also follow a journeyman path, where they study with at least two master carvers before making a 'master piece' to become a master themselves (if the master piece is good enough). Traditionally, only master carvers could open a workshop so the quality of work in the trade was kept high. Jo said that he did not complete his training to master level, mainly because it is quite expensive (about 10,000 euros).

Guild journeyman carvers dress, like other wood-based trades, in black with a black hat. The earring that they wear in the left ear is of gold, with a small carving tool (gouge, mallet etc.) that they have carved from wood fixed to it. Like other woodworking  guilds the ear is pierced using a rusty nail, which the journeyman will then carry on them often in their hat band. We discussed how sad it is that the traditional skills have become more fractured in Britain, which does not have a guild system in the same way. There is a 'Guild of Master Carvers' in existence here, but it is a very different kind of thing.

Jo has a show in Bath at the 44AD gallery from the 7th to the 13th of October 2013. You can see some of his current work from a previous show here.

Visiting Joachim Seitfudem's 'Zeitgeist' exhibition: a contemporary twist from a background of traditional Bavarian woodcarving

Today I visited an exhibition at a small pop-up gallery on College Green in Bristol called 'Zeitgeist'.
The exhibitor, Joachim Seitfudem, is a woodcarver from Bavaria who is now living in Bristol and whose father, Hans-Joachim Seitfudem, is a well-respected master carver in the Bavarian tradition.

It was very interesting talking to Joachim about how his father encouraged his carving from an early age. A lot of the woodcarving from that area depicts religious subjects, which isn't surprising when you consider that one of the main towns near the place that he grew up in is Oberammergau, famed for it's Christian passion plays (theatre re-enacting the suffering and death of Jesus).

A work in progress in the corner of the exhibition

In Britain, the religious upheavals following the Reformation during the 16th and 17th centuries mean that there isn't a continuous heritage of ecclesiastical carving. A lot of older church carvings were also deliberately destroyed by the Puritans, in their general campaign to make the country a more 'pious', drabber and more boring place. How many carvers must have lost their livelihoods or gone abroad in those times, when regular carving work must have been hard to find?

It's interesting to see, as a woodcarver, how the carving tradition is followed in areas like Bavaria or Austria which weren't subject to the same kind of disruptions as those experienced here. Joachim said that his father encouraged his carving from an early age, giving him exercises like carving a piece using only one gouge and sometimes destroying his son's pieces that weren't up to scratch (sounds brutal, but you certainly wouldn't make the same mistakes twice!) Some of these early exercises are on show in the corner of the gallery.

Carving figures in deep relief inside a piece of wood, surrounded by a 'frame' of unworked wood, seems to be feature of a lot of Hans-Joachim's work, although he also produces a lot of beautiful works in the round. Some of his son Joachim's early studies, like those shown above, also show this presentation style. 

All of the carvings in the exhibition are executed in linden, or lime, wood (Tilia sp.) More recent work by Joachim in the exhibition combines  the woodcarvings with found objects, mainly clock parts or pieces of bog oak, to make artworks with a much more contemporary feel to them. It can sometimes be hard to get metal and wood to work well together, but the old brass clock mechanisms work well with the lime wood. For some reason patinated, old metal often seems to work better visually with wood than shiny new metal to my eyes. The carvings show how Joachim's father's teaching and his traditional carving background have given him a strong sense of the human form, which the exaggerated musculatures of some of the figures in the more contemporary-styled pieces really display.

If you would like to see the exhibition, it is on until the 2nd April. You can see more of Joachim's work on his website at www.seitfudem-sculptor.com