Tracing the Art of the Straub Family

Priorities

- Transnational mobility

- Capacity building: Training and Education

Project description

The project is based on the fact that five brothers from the Straub family were in the 18th century leading sculptors in several cities in present-day Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia. The eldest son Johann Baptist Straub (1704–1784) had his workshop in Munich, Philipp Jakob Straub (1706–1774) in Graz, Joseph Straub (1712–1756) in Maribor, Johann Georg Straub (1721–1773) in Bad Radkersburg and the youngest son Franz Anton (1726–1774/76) lived and worked in Zagreb. So far, the opus of the Straub family has only been studied at the national level. The project aims at studying the opus of the family members as an artistic and historical unit demonstrating the development and adaptability of the style and the production level of the founding workshop. To achieve this, the project utilizes a single team of experts consisting of researchers from the four countries instead of mere exchange of results of their particular locally focused researches. Moreover, various disciplines and their respective methods are exercised simultaneously by the entire research team seeking consilience.

Project objective

The goal of the project is to create a catalog of the works of art attributed to the Straub family members. The project TrArS was designed to interconnect and intensify the cooperation between European experts and institutions in the field of protection of cultural heritage, to enhance the mobility of the experts, to promote the exchange of ideas and to interweave the culture and the science to bring the outcomes to the wide public.

Gained experience

Collaboration with colleagues from different formative and institutional backgrounds is an invaluable experience because individual perceptions do not add up, instead, interaction opens up a new, shared level of understanding. In professions linked to art and protection of the cultural heritage, deeper insight was also provided by collaboration with IT experts in designing and creating an art database that unified data gathered by all the professions involved: on artists, clients, refurbishments, materials used to create the artworks as well as those used in restoration. The monograph that is being jointly prepared will reflect the intersecting of all these different professional perspectives, and also show how individual research work is enriched by joint on-site visits and discussions in direct contact with the artwork.