Statues of the founders in Kastl Abbey - representation of Czech authorities in the Upper Palatinate (1355-1373)?

The study is devoted to the trio of statues of the founders in the church of the former Benedictine Kastl Abbey. At the time of the origination of the statues, in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, Kastl was situated in immediate proximity to the southern border of the Upper Palatinate, which was annexed to the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Soon thereafter, the joining of a new land ruled by the Luxembourg Dynasty and the Kingdom of Bohemia was symbolically reinforced when Charles IV renewed the long vanished title of Duke of Sulzbach and bestowed it on his son Wenceslas. If the statues in Kastl Abbey were in fact related to the Bohemian house of Luxembourgs, they would fit well into the context of the Charlesian depictions of monarchial predecessors in Prague, Karlstein, and Tangermünde. Nonetheless, the kinship with the Karlstein genealogy of Charles IV is not restricted to the ideological level; it is also obvious on the artistic level. The family tree that was completed shortly before the completion of the statues in Kastl Abbey includes exact models of figure types and their court attire. Analogies to the sculptural work can be traced to the 1350’s second-rate pre-Parlerian production in Rhineland and Central Europe.