The Interior of the Church in Lucklum

A Compendium of Early Modern European Emblematics

2019–2022

RFB05

The church in Lucklum houses an outstanding ensemble of Latin inscriptions and emblematic paintings from the early eighteenth century. Artists working in Lucklum deployed a great number of emblem books from all over Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain, Flanders, the northern Netherlands, the Baltic region, et cetera). The project combines expertise from the fields of theology, literary and art history, materials science, and information technology in order to document and historically contextualise all inscriptions and emblem paintings for the very first time. In so doing, we devote commensurate attention to particularly relevant constellations (history of theology and of piety, history of Bible exegesis, history of knowledge, and history of visual art). This entails, in particular, pursuing the question of how the 209 inscriptions and 156 paintings structure the church’s interior as a space of meditation and prayer and confer its unique form. Beneath the inscriptions and paintings, there exists an earlier layer consisting of completely different paintings and inscriptions.

Part of the project is devoted to reconstructing the former interior of the church in its entirety, for which we closely collaborate with experts from the field of materials science and utilise professional investigative methods (infrared reflectography, multispectral photography). Project results are recorded in a comprehensive catalogue, which is made available via open access as a digital working environment. It is visualised using a multidimensional presentation of the three-dimensional (3D) structures of the church interior and its various layers in the form of an immersive virtual reality (VR) representation.