Author unknown — St. Joseph, the Patron Saint of Zobor Hermits

The author of the sacral baroque painting is an uknown middle European painter from the second half of the 18th century. The multifigural sacral composition depicts the group of praying monks turning their eyes upon heaven and St. Joseph holding infant Jesus. At the same time St. Joseph is holding the white lily in his right hand, a symbol of purity and virtue. The view of the hermits are being repayed not only by St. Joseph who looks at the praying monks asking for protection over their monkhood and over the Camaldul monastery, but also by the child Jesus who is blessing the hermits. The exalted gestures of the portrayed figures are an adoration and an invocation of “ad oculos demonstrare.”

Apparently it presents the Patron Saint what also proves the Latin inscription under the painting: S. JOSEPH PECULIARIS EREMI ZOBOR PATRONUS, translated as ´St. Joseph, the Patron Saint of Zobor hermits´. According to Viliam Judák, this monkhood represented people who lived, to some degree, in seclusion from society. Camalduls searched for the new ideal in the more strict community and integration of the eremetical tradition of monastic life with that of the cenobium. The unknown author shows in the painting the whole monastery with the central basillica, islolated houses of the monks in the area under the Zobor hill. In the foreground there is a figural composition depicted so that is doesn´t cover the view over the one-storey monastery with the gardens and the church. This painting is distinguished by the remarkable perspective proficiency, nice variety of colours and presents levels that add to progressively more shadow details and mystic chiaroscuro. Such an academic painting style coming from Austria was presented in Slovakia in the second half of the 18th century. It also verifies the skilled painter who shows the attributes which are likely to be linked – the late baroque period with classicistic one that came into the middle Europe. It is assumed that the unknown painter was one of the Camaldul´s monks, so called ´silent monks´ from the Zobor monastery built by Blažej Jaklin in 1691-97 at the place of the former Benedictine´s monastery of St. Hyppolitus from 10th century mentioned in the Zobor´s records from 1111 and 1113. Nitra Gallery obtained this artwork into the Art Acquisition Fund in 1965 in a transfer from the Museum in Bojnice.