The Autumn of the Middle Ages in Moravia and Slesia is illuminated from the flares of the gold, from sparking of the enameled colors: a period of transition, in which the new renassaince requests take the place of the worn out gothic characters, a period rendered complex and fascinating by a network of relationship and external influences (from Italy, from the flemish area) of which it is possible to find the effect on an artistic truth absolutely original. The exhibition Last Flowers of the Middle Ages, inaugurated on 22 November and open until 7 January 2001, proposes a distance articulated through painting, sculpture, applied arts, delineating the variety of aspects and interactions of a period comprised between the 1400 and the 1550; the exposure is realized thanks to the collaboration between the Muzeum umeni of Olomouc and the Suprintendence for the Artistic and Historical Assets of Rome.

The encounter between the figurative moravian culture and that one of the Christian Rome goes back to the half of the IX sec., during Saints Cirillo and Metodio's preech: in this period, at the same time, it is spread two different stylistic characters: Greek (the two brothers from Tessalonica had been send from the emperor of Bisanzio Michele III) and Roman (as example of the direct and privileged relationship with Rome must remember the event of the transport of Saint Clemente's relics, represented in the homonymous church), which will form that oneness of language, a combination of hieratical fixity and expressionist deformation.

Moravia's history in the XV sec. is marked to ollow itself of succession and religion wars: the diffusion of the hussitismo, and the consequent iconoclastic tendency, made Olomouc the center of the institutions tied to the Church of Rome; in spite of the isolation of the Czech cities, Olomouc succeeded to maintain to relationships towards the outside (Low Countries, Italy) through the Slesia: it became, therefore, a true and just cultural center and motor propeller of the artistic clients tied to the episcopal curia. The inner fights that continued until the half of the XVI sec. did not prevent the increment of the production of works: the moravian court, before with Mattia Corvino, then with the reign of the king Jagelloni was opened to the infuences of the Italian and Flemish Renassaince, joining the culture of the ancient with a preciosity of later gothic taste. The exhibition counts than one hundred works more, between painted tables, examples of sculpture, applied arts and illuminated codes, in order to reconstruct the extraordinary season of " passage ", that autumn of the Middle Ages that marked the end of the court's age, with a transition still illuminated from the gold.

The Madonna Sternberk, dated around to years ninety of the XIV sec., is one polychrome sculpture in full relief, realized in marl (is one type of argillaceous limestone), example of that so-called bello stile: the figure, not much large one, is constructed from the sinous lines of the mantle's folds. It is a plastic work entire based on linear values: the cloth's ripples are curves, the golden hem are an ascending distance, towards the expressive nucleus of the composition: Virgin Mary's face and the Child. The faces are modelled sweetly, not are volumes too much pronounce, but light transition, still tied to the mutual relationship between the lines that characterize the eyes and those that determine the lips' folding. Completely different, for the expressive attempt and the plastic outcome, Olomouc's group of the Mount of the Olives (years thirty of the XV sec.), carved in sandstone stone, found again in the Church of Saint Maurizio, in origin probably placed in the adjacent cemetary. These four personages (but has been assumed the presence of fifth, today lost, an angel with goblet) are a full relief representation of the Biblical step of the oration in the garden. The figures are like closed shapes: the tunics' wide folds dig wide zones of shadow, those smallest ones, that the legs bending of and arm leave nearly to aureole from, determine thinner dark zones, like embrasures; the large, knotted hands, the faces, the cheek - bones'volumes, the forehead, the occipital cavity are the elements that connote in expressive way the unarmed humanity of the asleep apostles. It contrasts the " pyramid " of the Christ in prayer, firm and at the same time projected towards the high: a motion of rise from the base, until meeting of the folds, nearly in the point where the hands are committees, growing dramatic that culminates between the fingers, who are united and the face. A tension diluted, that observing bundling up itself of the hairs and the beard, still worked with a linear description.

The painting on table finds an example of highest value in the Altar of the Invention of the Saint Cross from Olomouc (1450 ca.), decomposed and today fortunately reconstructed polyptych. The work is formed from two larger tables, than horizontal cut, that they represent The Climb to the Calvary and The Crocifixion and four tables of smaller dimensions, of vertical cut, with The Last Supper, The Mount of the Olives, The Resurrection and The Invention and Tries of the True Cross; the style reveals some elements from bohemian school, in the characterization of the faces, the yield spaces them not realistic; the personages described with a thin handwriting grow tall, forced between the golden bottom and architectures proscenium incapable to contain them, the garments shine of enameled colors, ignited, the mantles are opened like corollas in pliant folds. The Crocifixion is a splendid horizontal theory, animated from the crosses' vertitices, from wriggles diagonal of the nozzle of Longino: the aureoles nearly embroidered, the red one, that it contrasts approached to the blue and the tawny one, the Christ's candid body of alabaster and the gold that the background closes, than sets the excited sucession of gestures and looks.

The Mass of Saint Gregorio (1480) was commissioned from the Abbess Perchta di Boskovice (like law in the inferior part of the original frame) for the Assumption's nunnery of Starè Brno: the painted table became the central part of the Corpus Dominions'altar, of which the abbess it had straight of patronage. The work represents the vision that had Saint Gregorio of the Christus Patients, with unusual iconographic elements, introduced for the defense of the catholic Christian cult, regarding the liturgy in use near the hussiti. The presence of the tower monstrance is anomalous, placed over the altar, while the covered goblet alludes to the hussita celebration, that it previewed the communion under the two species. The apparition of the Imago Pietatis to Gregorio Magno is an ulterior way to confirm the role of the Pope (and glare of the Church of Rome) like vicar and mediator near the faithfuls. The scene is inserted in a characterized architectonic space from the columns that stress the aisle on the bottom, the personages are disposed in a sort of semicircle, next to the miracle that is being completed: we see the plan of the altar, in a perspective end not perfectly resolved, such to make it "to slip" in ahead. The descriptive criterion is still later gothic: a tiny handwriting that engrave the gold of the sacred furnishings, embroiders the vestments, the dresses, records the blue of the wings of the angels, closes the empty one between the columns, "working" like a tapestry the gold surface of the bottom.

The works of Lucas Cranach the Old, present in this exhibition, exemplify that permeability in the comparisons of the flemish art: the two autograph tables, with The Decapitation of Saint John and The Decapitation of Saint Catherine (1515), constituted an altar's panels, placed inside of the Dome of Saint Venceslao di Olomouc. The representations of the two martyrdoms have homogenous dimensions and the same criterion of composition: on the sides two groups of personages, nearly two "wing", on the center the culminating scene of the dead women, on the background it is the landscape, in one seen crystalline. On the first plane the drama, amplified, reflected in the description of the faces of the bystanders, like counterpoint to the excitement, the metallic blue of the sky and the jade's green of the vegetation.

Between the examples of applied arts exposed, we remember the Altar Cross from Uherskè Hadriste and Augustin Kasenbrot's cup from Olomouc. The Cross, dated between 1350 - 1400, is one of the least works of sacred furnishings (has been some counted only six, in the collections of all the world), realized in silver and crystal; the cup (1508) is a masterpiece constructed from the assemblage of ancient Roman coins and one plate, mail on the bottom, with the representation of Bacchus child: emblematic work of disseminating itself of the Italian renaissance culture (the client, Augustin Kasenbrot, had completed studies of philosophy to Padova), of the advent, by now imminent, of one new season. The Cup, example humanistes' treatises, conserve the memory of the magnificent autumn in the working of the gold, in the stylized leaves, the tapes interlaces: a lexicon still composed by the bundle up of lines.