A large format photomontage based on The Miraculous Fishing by the painter Konrad Witz was hung on the facade of the Fusterie temple in Geneva. The five-meter-high and 12-meter-wide canvas will remain visible during the restoration work on the religious building, until 2027.
The initiative goes to the Protestant Church of Geneva (EPG), the owner of the temple. The aim of the project is to offer the population “a reflection on the image in the city”, indicates the EPG in a press release. In addition to the photomontage, fifteen panels retracing the history of Place de la Fusterie are erected around the site.
The photomontage entitled “Unfolded”, designed by the artist Jean Stern, offers “a rereading” of the famous painting that Konrad Witz completed in 1444. The work of the German painter has the particularity of being the first representation in history art “of a topographically accurate and recognizable place.”
We see in the foreground Christ, walking on the water, and fishermen on a boat, who are busy hauling in their nets. In the distance, the viewer familiar with the Geneva landscape will immediately distinguish the mountains which serve as a backdrop to the scene: the Voirons, the Môle and one end of the Salève.
The observer deduces that the body of water where the Gospel episode takes place does not represent a shore of Lake Tiberias imagined by the German painter, but that it is indeed the harbor of Geneva like the Konrad Witz’s eyes perceived it almost six centuries ago.
Offbeat figures
The photomontage attached to the Fusterie temple combines The Miraculous Fishing with contemporary images. “Between four cutouts of the painting, three scenes from today take place on the same bank, facing the mountains.” The photomontage also contains a fragment of Lake Geneva painted by Ferdinand Hodler, in the same place.
Through this project, the EPG wants to take Konrad Witz’s painting out of its glass case, at the Geneva Museum of Art and History (MAH). The revisited replica must question the public about the meaning of the work as a religious image and its meaning in the city. The painting has been admired, rejected, moved, restored over time.
The Fusterie temple was inaugurated in 1715. It was the first urban sanctuary built in Geneva after the Reformation. Its architecture, modeled on the temple of Charenton, a place of worship for the Parisian Reformed destroyed in 1686, contrasts with the architecture of the churches built in the Middle Ages within the perimeter of the Old Town.
This article was automatically published. Source: ats
