Another masterpiece returns to Lithuania – Albert Goštautas’ Manuscript Prayer Culture
Returning to the Museum of the Royal Palace for two months, the relic first reminds its owner, Albert Goštautas, of an independent, active nobility who has been in power in Lithuania for decades. It is interesting that Albertas Goštautas later started his career as a place in Novgorod, the Lithuanian champion, the voivodeship of Polotsk and Trakai, and for 17 years he was the actual head of the Lithuanian government – the Grand Chancellor, also called the Vice-King of Lithuania by nobles.
1528 Albertas Goštautas ordered an impressively decorated prayer, following the example of the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund the Elder and his wife Bona Sforza. Stanislaw Samosthelnik and his assistants had a workshop in Krakow at the time. This prayer, close to that of the rulers, was, according to historians, one of the attributes enshrined in status.
The Chancellor of Lithuania, as a customer and owner, with his characteristic facial features and secular clothes is depicted twice in prayer with the heraldic panels of Renaissance forms painted next to him. His family’s Abdank coat of arms, reminiscent of the letter “W”, adorns the margins of prayer. The prayer consists of 232 sheets of parchment numbered in pencil. It first begins with miniature-made, full-page, framed edging with a curved arch above. Sixteen of them are drawn.
Today, the Lithuanian Chancellor Albert Goštautas’ Prayer belongs to the library of the Ludwig and Maximilian University of Munich (Bavaria, Germany) and is protected as one of the most significant values of the Manuscripts Department.
The manuscript was to be inherited by his son, Stanislovas Goštautas (c. 1507–1542), after the death of Albert Goštautas, but he died without leaving any descendants and the property of the vastly extinct Goštautas family passed to the ruler Sigismund the Elder under the law of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This, in turn, gave the heritage of Goštautas to his son Sigismund Augustus, already in 1544. who became the actual Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1547. to the secretly married Barbora Radvilaitė, the widow of Stanislovas Goštautas.
Historians speculate that Ona Kotryna Konstancija, the daughter of Sigismund Vaz, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, may have taken the prayer as a dowry in 1642. married Philip Wilhelm Wittelsbach, the future elector of the Holy Roman Empire, the Rhineland-Palatinate and the Duke of Neiburg. Another hypothesis is possible that the prayer of the Lithuanian Chancellor Albert Goštautas could have been a prey to the Swedish war, because in the 17th century. in the middle of the twentieth century, the heavy rulers, nobles, monasteries and other libraries of the former rulers of the Two Nations were looted and looted, and their books spread throughout Europe.
Assessing one of the most unique Lithuanian values, preserved for almost 500 years and remembering one of the most famous men of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the patrons of the exhibition agreed to become the Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė and the Prime Minister of Bavaria dr. Markus Söder.
Curators of the exhibition – dr. Vydas Dolinskas, dr. Sven Kuttner.
The exhibition is dedicated to the 700th anniversary of the city of Vilnius, as Albertas Goštautas was the governor of Vilnius for many years.
June 22 The opening exhibition will run until August 28, and those wishing to see the relic who have returned for a short time are invited to visit the Exposition of Restored Historic Interiors at the Palace of the Rulers Museum.