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The
new staircase leads the visitor to the first floor of
the arcade and the spaces of the new treasury, with the
exhibition from the Loreto treasure. This collection of superb decorative artworks is,
in addition to the treasure of St Vitus Cathedral, the
only one of its type preserved in the republic.
The
most valuable piece, in both material and artistic
terms, is the famous Diamond
Monstrance, made between 1696-99 in the Viennese
workshops of J. B. Khünischbauer and M. Stegner. The
6,222 diamonds decorating this treasure were from the
bequest of Countess Ludmila Eva Frances Kolowrat.
This treasure is
rarely used in the liturgy today, only for very
exceptional occasions. The last time that pilgrims were
able to venerate the Body of Christ, exposed in the
gloriole of shining diamonds, was during a celebration
in the autumn of 1999, 400 years after the arrival of
the first Capuchins in Bohemia.
The sole Late Medieval
work in the treasury is the silver gilded chalice, with the date 1510 on the stem. This anonymous work is
decorated with a combined technique; judging by the
formal arrangement and the selection of saints used in
the decoration, it is most likely a Bohemian work. The
basket (the actual body of the vessel) has six fields of
alternately blue and red enamel with linear half-figures
of the saints, Suffering Christ and the Virgin Mary; on
the six-lobed base there are relief, cast and finely
chased half-figures. It cannot be ruled out that this
chalice, which Christoph Ferdinand Popel Baronet von
Lobkowitz gave to the Loreto in 1654, originally came
from the treasury of St Vitus.
One
of the most valuable pieces of the collection is the
domestic altar made of ebony wood, with a silver figural
group of the Nativity of Our Lord.
The
Bethlehem scene is set in the precise portal
architecture, with a series of silver miniature
additions. The extension is decorated with silver
sculptures of the Pieta and Christ as the Salvator
Mundi. The work is marked with the coat-of-arms of the
Mollart family, from which Maria, married to Adam Gallus
Popel von Lobkowitz, the mother of Benigna Katharina von
Lobkowitz, was descended. It is thus very likely that
the altar, as a family treasure, was donated to the
Loreto by the founder. The work bears the Augsburg mark
AL and was clearly made by the goldsmith Abraham Lotter
the Younger, documented in Augsburg between 1618-1625.
(Comparable works have been preserved in the treasury of
the Residence at Munich.)
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