The question of who is responsible for artistic production—designers, engineers, architects, builders, artisans—has been debated since antiquity. Aristotle, in Metaphysics, wrote, “We consider that the master craftsmen in every profession are more estimable and know more and are wiser than the artisans because they know the reasons of the things which are done; but we think that the artisans, like certain inanimate objects, do things but without knowing what they are doing.”Footnote 1 Karl Marx expressed a similar idea when he compared the work of the spider to that of the weaver, or the bee to an architect: what “distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees, is that an architect has built a cell in his head before he constructs it in wax.”Footnote 2 More recently, however, theorists like Loïc Wacquant have argued that the concept of embodied knowledge, which has become important in cultural anthropology since the 1980s,Footnote 3 troubles the distinction between imagination and creation and, consequently, the dominion of the mental over the physical that has long determined how art in its many forms has been understood.
This article takes up the question of whose work should be recognized as “artistic” to introduce a new approach to understanding a fascinating historical phenomenon. I argue that the bottom-up social, political, religious, and cultural history of the so-called Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders (Bregenzerwälder Barockbaumeister) can provide a stepping stone to a more comprehensive understanding of a Baroque building culture that was very much alive north of the Alps from the 1600s well into the eighteenth century.Footnote 4 “Bottom-up,” in this context, does not mean that I try to reread the Bregenzerwald Builders as some kind of almost-Marxist grassroots movement that found the Baroque building culture standing on its head and stood it back on its feet. Baroque building culture, in every form, was, in fact, very much dependent on top-down interests, including financial capacities, powerful agents like ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical princes, and sometimes communities with regulatory and organizational assertiveness.Footnote 5 The case of the Bregenzerwald Builders, however, helps to uproot not so much this dominion of material capacities and political power in the Baroque building culture, but rather the scholarly paradigm that elevated the role of the allegedly all-important architectural genius over mundane issues such as demography, mobility control, and guild organization. While these more mundane factors most certainly also have top-down qualities to them insofar as they decisively and sometimes overwhelmingly determine the lives of individuals, they can be considered, in relation to the scholarly paradigm of intellectual genius as the driving force behind Baroque building culture, bottom-up forces because they counteract the all-too-well-ordered system of privileging intellect over more material realities.
In this vein, I will focus on the balancing of power between the artisans’ guild and the local political authorities in the Bregenzerwald to understand how the Bregenzerwald Builders came to play an important role in the Baroque building boom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a recontextualization of these builders from a rather insignificant rural valley in the westernmost part of Austria—in modern-day Vorarlberg—puts, I believe, what we already know from decades of research, mainly in art history, in a new and illuminating context. The Bregenzerwald Builders are not as well known amongst international scholars as other contemporary architects and builders, especially those from Bavaria like Dominikus Zimmermann and others.Footnote 6 This is likely due less to the quality of their work which has, in fact, shaped much of the rather impressive Baroque landscape in what is today Southwestern Germany, Northeastern Switzerland, and the Alsace, but more to their quite local organizational structures. While the builders from Bavaria are more easily recognizable, and analyzable, by their connection to the famous monastery of Wessobrunn (“Wessobrunner School”) and to the politically quite centralized building culture in Bavaria, the Bregenzerwald Builders primarily worked in the Lake Constance region where, instead of a single central political authority, many individual monasteries stood behind the Baroque building boom.Footnote 7 They were also organized in a rural guild in their home valley. Therefore, they must be rediscovered in their own historical terms, that is, through the lens of local history.Footnote 8
New Findings and New Perspectives
The story behind the recovery of a rare artefact of architectural expertise in the 1940s in the alpine valley of the Bregenzerwald sounds like a historian’s wildest dream come true. It goes like this: When the heirs of a recently deceased, childless couple went through the attic of their house in Schoppernau, in westernmost Austria, they came across a strange volume with peculiar drawings. They intended to dispose of it—along with all the other useless junk they found—in the nearby Bregenzerach river. Fortunately, the village primary school teacher became aware of their discovery and made sure that the volume was not destroyed. In what can only be described as an almost unbelievable stroke of luck, the same teacher also came across yet another volume in the neighboring village of Au. This second volume was, for the most part, identical to the first one. An expert was consulted, and his assessment must have been quite breathtaking for those involved: the two volumes were, in fact, architectural pattern books from the early eighteenth century, and contained numerous hand-drawn copies of plans of realized and unrealized buildings (Figure 1). The volumes were akin to self-made Reader’s Digests of the core architectural theory of the time. They included manual copies of some of the most important architectural standard elements, like the well-known Five Architectural Orders of Column Design. Volumes of such design were practically unheard of, not only in the Bregenzerwald but in general.Footnote 9 The whole story was nothing short of sensational.Footnote 10
Figure 1 “The Five Orders of Architecture” as depicted in the Au Tutorials (vol. 1). Vorarlberg Museum.
It was, however, not only the peculiarity of their genre that made these volumes so valuable but also the location of their discovery. From the 1650s until well into the second half of the eighteenth century, Au, along with Schoppernau, had been the cradle of some of the most important Baroque master builders of the age. Along with others, they had transformed the wider Lake Constance region into a sacred landscape suffused with several of the finest examples of Baroque architecture.
The builders of the Bregenzerwald have become legendary in Central European architectural history. They reached their greatest fame posthumously, starting at the end of the nineteenth century when academic art history first became interested in the Baroque (which until then had the reputation of being kitsch—worse: religious kitsch—albeit on a grand and self-confident scale). In this context, fascination grew for ingenious master builders who were responsible for literally hundreds of new churches and monasteries. And, surprisingly, art historians found such ingenious master builders, too, in the remote and profoundly rural Bregenzerwald, which, to many, acquired the reputation of having been some kind of “rustic Florence.”Footnote 11 Michael Beer (c. 1605–66), for example, has long been credited as the founding father of the Guild of Au. Although his surviving oeuvre shows a man of a practical mind rather than architectural ingenuity, by the 1650s he had built up quite a reputation. The Prince Abbot of Kempten entrusted him with the new building of St. Lorenz Basilica, the first major project of a Baroque building spree in Southwestern Germany that followed the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (albeit only for a short time until Giovanni Serro took over this building site).Footnote 12 Beer was joined by his son Franz Beer (1660–1726), later ennobled Franz Beer von Blaichten, who was certainly the most productive member of the Guild of Au. Franz Beer planned, organized, or built dozens of churches and monasteries, and several non-ecclesiastical buildings, in the Lake Constance region, including Weißenau and St. Katharinenthal.Footnote 13 Or, from the same generation, Caspar (Andreas) Moosbrugger (1656–1723), known foremost, but not exclusively, for being the architect of the monumental Benedictine monastery complex and church of Einsiedeln in Central Switzerland, where he had become a monk in 1681/82. Or Peter Thumb (1681–1766), who, quantitatively (though, arguably, not qualitatively) overshadowed by his larger-than-life father-in-law Franz Beer, had been the mastermind behind several impressive building projects like the beautiful churches of Birnau and, maybe only in part, Ebersmünster, “the handsomest sacral building”Footnote 14 in Upper Alsace.Footnote 15
The Bregenzerwald, however, was not only known for the quality of the architectural individuals from its ranks such as the Beers, the Moosbruggers, and the Thumbs. It was also known for its extraordinary stamina in the production of remarkable quantities of able carpenters, bricklayers, and stonecutters who worked for generations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as seasonal workers on many of the construction sites in the German Southwest and beyond. From the late 1640s to the second half of the eighteenth century, the surviving guild books list more than 1,800 names of apprentices in the building crafts, mostly, although by far not exclusively, from Au and Schoppernau.Footnote 16 This number is even more impressive when one considers that in the 1670s the villages of Au and Schoppernau, then still making up one joint parish, had a total population of hardly more than 1,400 people.Footnote 17
The extraordinary thing about this was not the number of artisans per se. We know, for example, of similar quantities in the Außerfern in Tyrol or in the South-Eastern Switzerland Valle Mesolcina. In the Außerfern, however, a local guild for this massive quantity of artisans was created (which, incidentally, was primarily a religious organization with its own guild churchFootnote 18), but no remarkable architects were ever brought up in this guild.Footnote 19 The Valle Mesolcia, in contrast, may have produced several important architects, but no local guild was founded there to organize a large number of artisans.Footnote 20 In the Bregenzerwald, in contrast, both these dimensions coincided: there was a guild for the organization of the impressive quantity of artisans; and there was an environment where able architects could be trained. And right here, in between the individual biographies of the remarkable architects on the one hand and the quantity of artisans emerging in the Bregenzerwald on the other, an explanatory challenge rather forcefully imposes itself upon the historian of the Bregenzerwald Builders, which, many thought, could finally be adequately met by the 1940s findings of Au and Schoppernau. The problem was this: Since the end of the nineteenth century, when Cornelius Gurlitt introduced this region’s builders to the realm of academic art history,Footnote 21 scholars had been fascinated by the individual biographies of architects from the Guild of Au. Up until the 1940s, however, identifying the historical link between these extraordinary individual biographies and the equally extraordinary quantity of trained building craftsmen within this very guild had meant choosing between two rather unsatisfactory options.Footnote 22 One option had been the way of nationalistic, or overly romanticized, history. This had effectively required going along with Gurlitt’s crudely folkish explanation that the masses of simple peasants-turned-artisans from the remote alpine Bregenzerwald had to be seen as the “springs of young national strength” [junge Volkskraft] of the “sturdy artistry and the big thoughts” [kernhafte Künstlerschaft und große Gedanken] of the architectural geniuses emerging from their midst.Footnote 23 The other option had been the way of social or economic history. This had meant, again roughly speaking, to interpret the masses of artisans from this guild as hardly more than human resources from which their more successful fellow guild men in architecture and building organization had drawn the construction crews needed for their massive building sites in Southwestern Germany and beyond.
In the aftermath of the findings of the 1940s, an alternative, or at least more comprehensive, view finally seemed possible. Soon this alternative view would become the standard when it came to bringing together the extraordinary individual biographies of architects and the extraordinary number of artisans in the building crafts. Even more than that, it would massively change the general understanding of the Bregenzerwald Builders. This alternative view was the product of intellectual history. According to virtually all interpreters, the newly discovered volumes emphatically suggested rereading the history of the Bregenzerwald Builders, and the Guild of Au, as a history of a well-ordered and surprisingly sophisticated process of information diffusion. These volumes, it was argued, were first and foremost teaching materials; accordingly, they were named Au Tutorials [Auer Lehrgänge]. The Guild of Au, according to this interpretation, was to be understood primarily as an educational institution. In the context of this educational institution, the Au Tutorials were believed to have been used to provide the numerous artisans-in-the-making with the necessary theoretical knowledge to become craftsmen who were capable of realizing the visions of the architects among them who had risen to fame and fortune. In addition, this education laid the foundation for those who would become renowned architects themselves.Footnote 24 The Au Tutorials, in this interpretation, were the incarnation of the very essence of this specific guild with its merging of quality in architectural knowledge and quantity in artisanry. They were a testament to the unique character of the Guild of Au that made it different from other guilds in the building crafts.Footnote 25 Although these volumes may have been physically produced in the early eighteenth century, in spirit, scholars argued, they went back to the earliest beginnings of organized building craftsmanship in the Bregenzerwald in the middle of the seventeenth century. Within this new paradigm Gaspard Pinette, for example, argued that Michael Beer not only found the Guild of Au on an organizational level in the 1650s. He had also been the founding father of its specifically intellectual, or educational, character, which was later materialized in the Au Tutorials. The Au Tutorials, he reasoned, corroborated this assessment clearly enough, because there were sketches and plans in them that could only come, it was argued, from Michael Beer’s architectural knowledge of Italy, the heartland of Baroque architecture, that he had brought with him when he returned to his native Bregenzerwald after extensive travel. Many years later, through twists and turns unknown, this rich knowledge eventually found its way into the Au Tutorials.Footnote 26 To sum up: these extraordinary pattern books were used to argue that the individual architectural geniuses from the Guild of Au, beginning with Michael Beer, and the collective masses of artisans of this guild had to be reimagined in the context of a teacher-student-relationship. The conveyance of superior architectural knowledge from the architects to the artisans had been the raison d’être of the guild’s existence. Or, to put it even more succinctly: the Guild of Au had been founded and organized as a school, the Au Tutorials had been schoolbooks, the leading architects had been teachers, and the scores of artisans had been their students.Footnote 27
In the context of this new scholarly paradigm, born in the 1940s and then further developed in the years afterward, exciting questions arose. Probably the most contested of these questions was this: who created the Au Tutorials? What seemed certain, though the lack of quality in the artistic execution of some of the plans and sketches was noticed early on,Footnote 28 was that only a major architect could have brought volumes filled with this kind of architectural knowledge to the Bregenzerwald. The fact that right at the time of the discovery of the Au Tutorials a wave of enthusiasm for Caspar Moosbrugger among scholars was just about to reach its breaking point, made him the obvious choice for many. After decades of interpreting Caspar Moosbrugger as hardly more than an executor of the ideas of other, more brilliant architects, in the middle of the twentieth century he was suddenly regarded by many as the creator of the unique “architectural visions”Footnote 29 realized in the vast complex of the monastery of Einsiedeln including the monumental convent church, which made it “one of the most original and beautiful spaces of the Baroque.”Footnote 30 He was also seen as the ingenious mind behind the Baroque building boom in Eastern Switzerland, and beyond.Footnote 31 Was it not likely, therefore, that he was also the mind behind the Au Tutorials? Quite some scholarly effort was summoned to show that this was more than a hunch and that the content of these volumes clearly indicated his direct, or at least indirect, authorship.Footnote 32 With the Au Tutorials, it was believed that aspar Moosbrugger had given back to the Guild of Au, naturally in a highly sophisticated and developed form, what he had received from this guild decades before as an aspiring youth, namely: the knowledge that had enabled him to unfold his architectural calling. This scenario conveniently fitted to a vacation of several weeks Moosbrugger had spent in his native Au in the summer of 1715. Taking a vacation was highly irregular for a Benedictine monk in the early eighteenth century and reframing his time in the Bregenzerwald as an “educational trip” seemed to resolve a longstanding puzzle. Educational not so much for Moosbrugger himself, naturally, but for his fellow guildsmen, to whom he gifted at this occasion, it was argued, the neatly and systematically collected knowledge in the Au Tutorials.
In the second half of the twentieth century, Caspar Moosbrugger once again lost the overwhelming appeal he had enjoyed among art historians in the years before the 1950s.Footnote 33 What had previously been regarded as an extraordinary originality in his art, was now, by many, seen as amateurish. His contemporary Franz Beer von Blaichten with his more obvious proficiency and productivity as an architect and a building organizer, took his place, at least to some extent. This, however, did not change the general outlook the Au Tutorials had introduced into the study of the Bregenzerwald Builders.Footnote 34 Those who did not stick to Moosbrugger as the mastermind behind the Tutorials still saw them as the key to understanding the architects, the artisans, and the guild.Footnote 35 If not Moosbrugger, some concluded, it must have been another architectural genius who stood behind the Au Tutorials.Footnote 36 Several absurd attempts to pinpoint one specific individual showed how difficult this actually was.Footnote 37 But even if this genius could not be identified by name or biography, the Au Tutorials still provided ample evidence that the Guild of Au had been an extraordinary educational institution. For generations, architects of the highest rating had provided hundreds of apprentices from the building crafts with extraordinary architectural knowledge. They stabilized the system of seasonal migration, from spring to autumn, of the Bregenzerwald building craftsmen who, due to their sophisticated architectural education, were unusually well equipped to work on the numerous construction sites of the building spree in the German South-West. Due to this training, they could stay in the Baroque building game longer than any other specific group of construction workers like, for example, the Swiss building craftsmen from the Valle Mesolcina.Footnote 38 This was the secret of the Guild of Au’s success.
The Au Tutorials made education the key to understanding the notable architects and many artisans of the Guild of Au, and their connections. These teacher-architects had been the ones who had kept the guild up and running for such a long time. They had been the ones who had provided the simple artisans in this guild with knowledge and competencies that had made them extra-valuable workers on the building sites of their time. And they had been the organizers of the astounding flux of architectural knowledge within the guild and, as such, the sustainers of the guild per se. Rereading, in this way, the history of this guild as a history of an educational institution made it possible to reimagine the relationship between architects and artisans in a creative way and opened up new and exciting scholarly perspectives. This rereading, of course, was also very much a top-down approach to understanding why and how the Bregenzerwald could become one of the major centers of building craftsmanship in the German-speaking world at this time and why and how it could stay one for so long. The sources of the extraordinary success of the Bregenzerwald Builders were, according to this new paradigm, to be found in the architects with their special knowledge, who had developed a stable and long-time educational system, including the Au Tutorials, to pass it down to the artisans (and not, like Gurlitt’s nationalistic-romanticist view would have it, the other way round).Footnote 39 This had enabled them to create a distinct architectural outlook beyond individual preferences. Inspired by Jesuit Baroque Builders, they had developed a signature style of building churches using wall pillars in otherwise rather simply structured halls (“Vorarlberger Münsterschema”). This architectural style, which reached its artistical apex in Michael Thumb’s churches in Schönenberg ob Ellwangen (1682–95) and in Obermarchtal (1686–92), both located in Upper Swabia,Footnote 40 could only become the signature style of the Bregenzerwald Builders, it was argued, because they had an educational system that provided the artisans in-the-making, and future master builders and architects, with the skills and the outlook to realize churches in this style. What they had learned from the Jesuits, they had, in simplified, though effective form handed over to aspiring artisans in the guild.
It is probably about time to reread this rereading.
Revisions and Reconsiderations
A rereading of the intellectual-educational approach to the history of the Bregenzerwald Builders does not and must not entail offhandedly dismissing this long-established scholarly paradigm. In fact, the potential of this paradigm has certainly not yet been fully tapped. It stands to reason that future research into the intellectual-educational character of the Guild of Au, including the Au Tutorials, and its importance for the creation of a specific Southwestern German Baroque building culture will take us far beyond what we know at the moment. Also, it would be a worthwhile field of research, again top-down in design, to uncover why several of the best-known Bregenzerwald Builders moved away from the Bregenzerwald when fame hit, but did not cut ties with their native land. Franz Beer and his son-in-law Peter Thumb, for example, became respected citizens and officials of the city of Constance but maintained strong connections to the Guild of Au, including active roles in admitting, educating, and acquitting artisans. Was there, speaking in terms of the history of mentality, some sort of pride in local tradition at work in this? And was this not yet fully understood phenomenon of these respectable architects’ and master builders’ attachment to their guild important for the surprisingly long and successful existence of the Guild of Au?
What seems clear, however, is that the decidedly top-down approach with its clear-cut teacher-student character, including other similar questions concerning the connection of the famous architects and master builders with the guild, has its problems; and it is because of these problems that it needs a rereading. Its massive success has tended to obscure other dimensions that were also significant for the guild’s long-time relevance as a provider of intellectual and manual manpower for the creation of Southwestern German Baroque. The guild’s character as a religious fraternity, which, to this day, has never really been put under systematic scholarly scrutiny, comes to mind.Footnote 41 In this context, it would be fascinating to find out how it came about that, of all places, it was the village of Au—until about 1620 home to a substantial community of dissenting AnabaptistsFootnote 42—that became, starting in the 1650s, an important center for the architectural revival and restoration of Catholicism in the German South-West. This process must have been connected to profound religious transformations in the local society of Au, or the Bregenzerwald, which, very likely, also played a role in the foundation of the guild. It is a shame that we do not really know in what way.
Perhaps more critically, the top-down educational approach with its teacher architects and student-artisans has lost sight not only of the religious realities of the Bregenzerwald in particular but of sociopolitical elements within this historical context in general that cannot be reduced to educational issues. That Baroque architecture was not and could not be all highflying visions generated within a sophisticated network of artists and architects on a European or even global scale, but had strong bottom-up qualities to it, has already been noted, of course, at least to a certain extent. Matthäus Pest’s 1937 study on the material aspects of the Baroque building industry in Southern Germany was groundbreaking in this regard.Footnote 43 Pest’s main concern lay with the organization of construction sites from a decidedly financial perspective; he stressed the degree to which financial issues shaped the actual process of building churches and monasteries. Hartmut Zückert followed up on this more than half a century later. In a 1988 book, which, incidentally, also dealt rather extensively with architects from the Bregenzerwald like Michael Beer and Peter Thumb, he focused on the question of the relevance of compulsory labor of peasants for their lords’ building projects.Footnote 44 Several years later he reread this to uncover historical patterns of perceptions of these building projects both by lords and peasants.Footnote 45 Peter Hersche and Bernd Roeck, though quite different from Zückert in their final assessments, have also substantially contributed to this project of understanding the Baroque building industry from economic and material necessities in the building processes of churches and monasteries.Footnote 46 Apart from these comprehensive and ambitiously comparative attempts to understand Baroque architecture in relation to its material, organizational, and financial underpinnings, there are several small-scale, but impressively in-depth studies on material dimensions to be considered in the organization of individual building sites. These studies often provide detailed information concerning the division of labor on these building sites and on the day-to-day routine of the artisans and workers, including, among other issues, their provisions, their working hours, and their wages.
Studies such as these have been helpful in uncovering dimensions of the building culture which had been overlooked for quite a long time. The case of the Bregenzerwald Builders and the Guild of Au, however, may raise awareness that uncovering such material and other hitherto unregarded qualities of Baroque architecture requires going beyond the construction sites of Baroque churches, monasteries, and palaces. “Going beyond,” in this context, is meant quite literally, that is, in its geographical sense. It means that when it comes to uncovering the “material and sociohistorical dimensions of building”Footnote 47 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it could be helpful not only to understand how construction sites were organized, financed, and maintained but also to follow the construction crews when they returned to their homes in often far-away alpine valleys after months of working on these construction sites. It prompts us to ask questions concerning the material and sociohistorical dimensions that organized their lives both at home and in between their homesteads and their work sites. A historical attentiveness to these dimensions could tell us not only more about the artisans per se and how and why they had become part of the building industry, both individually and collectively, but also more about the building culture itself. Interpersonal networks among artisans, channels of communication, aspects of religious motivation, processes of the diffusion of knowledge, dimensions of the artisans’ economic living conditions, political determining factors, or biographical patterns of these artisans might be reconstructed to help us understand Baroque building culture from a decidedly bottom-up perspective. In this article, I will not be able to do all this; instead, I will focus on reconstructing the sociopolitical frame that was relevant for the realization and specification of the aspects just mentioned. Thus, I hope to provide future research with a context for further historical analysis.
The Bregenzerwald was the sociopolitical context of the Guild of Au as a long-term association of artisans, who, for several generations, were annually traveling between their homesteads and their construction sites. This region, therefore, is an excellent candidate for a case study focused on bottom-up concerns such as these. Such a case study would require a comprehensive reconstruction of the cultural, social,Footnote 48 economic, religious, and political environment of the guildsmen of the Bregenzerwald in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 49 This is, at the moment, a scholarly work in progress.Footnote 50 Assuming, however, that Carlo Ginzburg is correct in his assertion that identifying and analyzing clues is the essence of doing history and the indispensable starting point for the reconstruction of more comprehensive historical patterns,Footnote 51 let us begin by identifying and analyzing clues that may help us to reevaluate the Guild of Au and its artisans from a comprehensive bottom-up perspective in the future. From there, we can proceed to a more nuanced understanding of early modern building culture in general.
This is where Joseph Willi comes in. His life provides a major clue to be considered in future research. Joseph Willi is not a household name in the historical research on the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders. In fact, he has never been mentioned in this context so far. To make things worse, not only was he not one of the well-known architects from the guild’s ranks, he is not even listed in the Au guild books with their scores and scores of apprentices along with the ever-monotonous information about their masters and the dates of their admissions and their acquittals.Footnote 52 If we trusted these guild books to represent, at least quantitatively, the world of the Bregenzerwald building craftsmen, Joseph Willi would simply be a nonentity.Footnote 53 However, in fact, his life shows that to understand the living conditions of these craftsmen and the guild adequately, we need to broaden our scope beyond sources like the guild books that are directly linked to these craftsmen. In the case of Joseph Willi, we can do this thanks to an interrogation protocol from June 1709.Footnote 54 Preserved only in fragments, this protocol nevertheless allows a glimpse into his life, which seems to have been as chaotic as the document itself.
Willi’s life as a building craftsman began, as far as we can tell, quite comme il faut. Born in October 1686 in Au, Joseph Willi, like so many of his peers, started a career in building crafts in his teenage years.Footnote 55 In 1704, aged seventeen, he became a bricklayer’s apprentice. His master was none other than Valerian Brenner, a successful architect with considerable influence. Valerian Brenner had left Au in the 1670s for Günzburg in the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, where he had made a career as an architect and master builder for the prince-bishop and as an independent building contractor and consultant for other clients.Footnote 56 Like other builders who had become famous after leaving the Bregenzerwald, Brenner kept in contact with his former home, obviously not only to have access to the Guild of Au’s manpower for his projects but also as a potential supervisor for the education of aspiring youths.Footnote 57
Joseph Willi, who called Valerian Brenner his “cousin” [Vetter], came from the Bregenzerwald to Günzburg by the Danube. And that was where his calamities began. It seems he not only committed himself to learning how to be a bricklayer, but also dipped into the business of thievery. Fatally, he would not be able to free himself of this dangerous habit, which would very much determine the rest of his life. Because he had stolen a student’s “writing utensils, penknife and other such things” [schreib zeüg, feder meser und dergleichen Sachen], he had to leave Günzburg before completing his apprenticeship. As a result, his name never made it into the guild-books. After being dismissed, he went to Rastatt by the Rhine, about 200 kilometers from Günzburg, where he continued his thieving career. Although it is not easy to follow the chronological order of events, due to the messy character of the interrogation protocol, it is sufficiently clear that Joseph Willi more than once tried to get back on track as a building craftsman. In the fall of 1707, he “returned home from Einsiedeln” [von Einsidlen nacher haus]. This was exactly the time when Caspar Moosbrugger was busy advancing the new building of Einsiedeln Abbey.Footnote 58 Being a Bregenzerwald compatriot seems to have given Joseph Willi the opportunity to work there, even though he had left his apprenticeship unfinished. Then, despite the earlier unpleasant incidents in Günzburg, in the summer of 1708, his former master Valerian Brenner accepted him, once again, as an employee.
But his troubled past and his growing reputation as an untrustworthy fellow eventually caught up with him and made him persona non grata, even in his old home in Au. Arriving there in the fall of 1708, he had to hide in an “abandoned house for 14 days in the hay” [öden haus 14 täg in dem höw], where his mother supplied him with bread and cheese; he improved this rather frugal diet by breaking into Michel Albrecht’s cellar, where he drank wine and ate sausages. This situation, apparently, became unbearable for him, so, after a fortnight, he went back to the prince-bishopric of Augsburg, where he served in a confusing chain of employments between Augsburg and Burgau. Then, on Candlemas (2 February) 1709, he returned for only three days to Au. Joseph Willi does not say why, but the only feasible explanation for this journey of several hundred kilometers for such a short stay is that he must have tried to sign up for one of the construction crews that were typically assembled at this time of year.Footnote 59 Obviously, he failed in this and went back to Augsburg, more precisely to the nearby village of Zusmarshausen, where he “worked for some time for a master named Franz” [ain zeit lang bei ainen maister mit namen Franz geschaffet], possibly in the building crafts. Again, not for long. In May 1709 he left Zusmarshausen and, despite all his earlier problems, returned once again to Au. There he was caught red-handed in the middle of a burglary spree while trying to forcibly open the table drawer of one Jacob Erath with a blacksmith’s chisel. He got away and hid, for the last time, in a hay hut, until he was finally caught by the officials of the Bregenzerwald, who started questioning him on 20 June 1709 in the village of Egg.
Over the course of two days of interrogation, on 20 and 28 June, Joseph Willi, then twenty-two years old, recapped the long list of his wrongdoings in the course of his rather short life, ending with the palpably resigned statement to his interrogators, that “they should do with him whatever they liked” [man möge mit ihm anfangen, was man wolle]. He could only promise, he told them, that “he would try to become better in every way” [er wolle sich in all weeg besseren]. Unfortunately, we know neither what the Bregenzerwald officials did with him nor if he was able to keep his promise to improve his way of life and make himself respectable again. Thievery, of course, was potentially a capital crime and we have several charters from the Bregenzerwald recording death sentences against thieves.Footnote 60 Such a harsh conviction, however, seems unlikely in this case; nothing in the interrogation protocol suggests it.
Joseph Willi, at any rate, provides a much-needed reminder for everyone seriously interested in the history of the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders. His life shows powerfully that to understand the reciprocal relationship between the building business and the society of the Bregenzerwald, it is not enough to focus on the architectural geniuses. Willi’s life, unorthodox as it was, was probably more representative of the living conditions and the social circumstances of the average guildsman of Au than of those of famed architects like Franz Beer or Caspar Moosbrugger. However, Joseph Willi is not only important for revealing how complex and precarious the lives of ordinary artisans from the Bregenzerwald must have been. The fact that we only know about him from a chance interrogation protocol also shows that it is not enough to focus exclusively on the most obvious historical sources for research on the artisans involved in the building business, such as guild books, building contracts, diaries, and letters of sponsors, initiators, or supervisors of Baroque building projects such as abbots.Footnote 61 More than that, Willi’s existence at the fringes of the guild system should make us aware that the Guild of Au was not the exclusive institutional intermediary that connected the local culture of the Bregenzerwald and the international culture of the Baroque building industry. Or, to be more precise, his life shows that it is necessary to contextualize the significance of this guild within much broader sociopolitical dynamics that determined the lives of most people—people like Joseph Willi—in the Bregenzerwald.
Altough fascinating and deliciously colorful, Joseph Willi’s willingness to cross the line between honesty and thievery certainly was not what makes his life interesting on a sociopolitical level. Nor should it be considered “typical” of the Bregenzerwald Builders. What is likely far more telling and socially relevant was Willi’s remarkable mobility and the fact that he acted out this mobility within the guild’s structures when possible, but also outside of them when necessary. As is well known, comprehensive patterns of mobility are virtually impossible to reconstruct for, not only the Bregenzerwald Builders, but similar artisans more generally; the historical sources we have are too fragmentary for such an undertaking.Footnote 62 The case of Joseph Willi provides a welcome example to further flesh out the concept of the “Wanderjahre” in artisans’ lives generally, and, specifically, in the lives of artisans associated with the Bregenzerwald Builders. What makes Joseph Willi so relevant is that his life draws attention to a fact which, interestingly, has hardly been noticed among scholars so far. His mobility is a clue to be followed when it comes to uncovering sociopolitical patterns that formed the early modern Bregenzerwald. Specifically, it helps to uncover the relevance of the local political representatives in the regulation and control of mobility; the very representatives who had put Joseph Willi on trial.
Politics of Mobility
There are many dimensions to consider when it comes to understanding mobility and its importance for a given historical society: economic interests, family traditions, political issues, military concerns, and religious convictions.Footnote 63 It would also be interesting to add to such structural dimensions as many individual biographies of ordinary people on the move as possible. Such biographies would certainly help uncover patterns of mobility that can only be detected inductively. One major obstacle is the difficulty of finding individual biographies such as Joseph Willi’s. Without them, the historiographical project “to discern the concreteness of social processes through the reconstruction of the lives of men and women of modest birth” obviously cannot be realized.Footnote 64
Thankfully, there is one important institutional protagonist in the regulation of mobility we can safely identify right now: the political community in charge of the geographically extensive valley of the Bregenzerwald. This institutional protagonist’s activities in the regulation of mobility challenge well-established assumptions concerning the Guild of Au and the organization of seasonal work of building craftsmen from the Bregenzerwald. It is no surprise that mobility was an important issue in the Bregenzerwald, considering its strong demographic growth in the early modern era. From 1511 to the middle of the seventeenth century, its population doubled from 3,000 to 6,000 people. Such a growth rate was not unusual for alpine communities at this time. However, as Jon Mathieu has shown convincingly in several in-depth local studies on alpine South-Eastern Switzerland, demographic growth does not necessarily lead to specific forms of mobility or migration.Footnote 65 For understanding such specific forms of mobility an organizing sociopolitical context, force, or protagonist is necessary to give structural shape, in whatever way, to the raw challenges of demographic growth.Footnote 66 In the Bregenzerwald, this protagonist was the valley community that had been the established political authority of the region since the late Middle Ages.Footnote 67 Its most important representative or official was the “Landammann.”Footnote 68 A closer look at the respective historical sources shows that controlling mobility was, in fact, a very important concern for officials in this political community in the early modern period. A petition of the Landammann and his councilors from March 1536 to their Habsburg lord’s government in Innsbruck shows why.Footnote 69
In this petition, they detailed a major problem for their community: “Due to the harsh conditions of their country only very few people moved to them, but quite a lot moved away from them” [wie von wegen reühe ihres lands nur wenig leute zu inen ziehen, aber wol vil von inen wegk ziehen]. If, as many historians used to think, overpopulation had been a problem for alpine valleys at this time because of their limited natural resources, then such emigration would not have been a problem; on the contrary, it could have been a welcome outlet of demographic pressure. The Bregenzerwald officials, however, obviously saw things quite differently. This continuing emigration was a big problem because it made it difficult to pay the seigneurial taxes that were demanded from the Bregenzerwald as a collective political community. The Bregenzerwald officials allocated these taxes to the individual taxpayers not only according to their landholding but also to their “cash” [parschafft]. The problem was, they explained in this petition, not primarily that the emigrants went away, but that they took their money with them and, thus, deprived the community of the Bregenzerwald of essential parts of its collective wealth. The result was troubling: those who remained had to contribute higher sums to enable their valley community’s officials to pay the communal taxes to their lord. Financial or economic, not demographic, pressure was the issue in the early modern Bregenzerwald’s stance toward emigration. That was why the Landammann and his councillors petitioned to be allowed to demand an emigration fee from every emigrant (instead of the usual, but, in this regard, quite useless immigration fee) as compensation for the loss of collective wealth. That would take pressure away, it was hoped, from the individual Bregenzerwald taxpayers. Their lord’s government, after several twists and turns, allowed this. Almost 200 years later, in 1705, no other than Franz Beer von Blaichten, the superstar among the Bregenzerwald Builders, had to deal with this regulation when he was about to move from the Bregenzerwald to the city of Constance. His notable financial fortune of 11,000 guldens would have meant an equally notable emigration fee for him. Because the officials of the Bregenzerwald would not meet him halfway in this, he did not shy away from threatening them that he would use his connections in high places and even appeal to the Holy Roman Emperor to “help himself by means of an imperial resolution” [er welle sich der kayserlichen resolution behelffen].Footnote 70
To be sure, actions of the Bregenzerwald Landammann and his councillors such as this 1536 petition did not only affect Franz Beer von Blaichten or others like him from the quite thinly populated stratum of the super-wealthy and successful Bregenzerwald Builders. They had major consequences on a sociopolitical and administrative level.Footnote 71 This is also true for other communal activities such as the fostering and regulation of the cultivation and seasonal operation of alpine pastures for cattle in summer, which had massively increased since the late Middle Ages.Footnote 72 With this commitment to regulating and fostering this process, the community’s officials, especially Landammann and his councillors, were also involved in the transformation of “bad” permanent emigration into “good” seasonal migration. What it had done in 1536 for the control of horizontal emigration, it was doing in this context on a vertical level, that is, between the lowlands of the valley homesteads of the people of the Bregenzerwald and their newly cultivated pastures in the mountains.
This commitment to mobility or migration control by the officials of the political community in the Bregenzerwald, which becomes visible in these exemplary cases, challenges two core beliefs of previous scholarship on the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders and the Guild of Au. First is that the Guild of Au was founded single-handedly around 1650 by the primordial Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builder Michael Beer. According to this theory, Beer had introduced and realized the idea of an association of artisans to his compatriots and convinced them to jump on the bandwagon of the Baroque building industry that he had encountered in his many years abroad. The second one is the conviction that this guild was not only self-created but also an effectively self-governed institution that exercised authority vis-à-vis its members.
Both these core beliefs can claim to be founded on historical sources. Since the mid-seventeenth century, guild-books registered admissions and acquittals of apprentices, not least for the future issuing of apprenticeship certificates. There was also the guild’s 1707 Regulations for Stonecutters and Bricklayers which established that the “Brudermeister” (Master of Brothers)—along with the “Zunftmeister” (Guildmaster) the leading official of the guild—was responsible for dealing with “all conflicts concerning the artisanry in its scope and to punish them according to the respective circumstances” [alle stritigkheiten, was das handtwerch in seinem gebüet belangen thuet für nemben und nach gelegenheit der sache abstraffen].Footnote 73 Both these core beliefs effectively took the guild, and with it the respective architects and the artisans, out of its sociopolitical context that was effectively constituted by the political community of the Bregenzerwald, by making it an individual product of ingenious architects and by declaring it a self-governed body. By doing this, these core beliefs turned what was probably the majority of (seasonal) migrants into something, with which the political community of the Bregenzerwald, represented by the Landammann and his councilors, effectively had nothing to do.
Knowing, however, the keen interest of the officials of the Bregenzerwald Valley community in enforcing mobility control, this all sounds very unlikely. It is hardly conceivable that the Guild of Au, which was so intensely involved in the seasonal migration of artisans from the Bregenzerwald, could have sidelined the political community’s interest in this matter so easily. It becomes even more unlikely considering that there are no records from the time of the guild’s establishment in the mid-seventeenth century to corroborate the idea of its foundation solely by Michael Beer. We only know about the circumstances of the guild’s founding from tales written down half a century later at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when they were put to paper in a time of existential crisis for the guild from outside forces.Footnote 74 Michael Beer and his single-handed foundation of the guild was the perfect origin myth for hard times; to what extent it was more than that is uncertain.
The long silence in the archives concerning the founding years of the guild is compounded by the absence of records to prove that the guild effectively executed the regulatory and punitive power it claimed to have in the 1707 Regulations for Stonecutters and Bricklayers. More powerful even than such conclusions e silentio are records that show how strongly the officials of the political community of the Bregenzerwald was committed to the organization and control of local artisanship. Consequently, it becomes even more unlikely that this did not affect the Guild of Au. A charter from 22 August 1567 is important in this regard.Footnote 75 There, with reference to imperial regulations, the Bregenzerwald Landammann was informing “all and every one of our compatriots and artisans” [allen unnd jeden unser mit unnd handwerckhs leute] that there was no such thing as a regulatory or penal power of artisans executed by themselves. If, in their respective crafts, conflicts arose, they had to be taken up by the “proper authority” [ordentliche oberkeit]. And this proper authority, in the Bregenzerwald, was the Landammann and his councillors as the major representatives of the political community.
Probably even more important is a petition from 1598.Footnote 76 In it the Landammann successfully asked his Habsburg lord for the exclusive privilege “to establish guilds, associations or fraternities, according to the circumstances, among all artisans” [under allen hanndtwerchern nach gelegenhait der sach zünfften, gesöll oder bruderschafft ainrichten].Footnote 77 Based on this communal privilege, there could be no self-founded or self-regulated guild of artisans in the Bregenzerwald—neither Michael Beer, nor anyone else, however artistically ingenious or however learned as an architect, could have changed that.
All this means: the circumstances of the foundation of the Guild of Au, its organizational structure, and its role as a regulatory agent of seasonal migration of artisans from the building crafts need careful historical reconsideration. To understand the guild, it must be placed in the context of the actions, concerns, and interests of the political community of the Bregenzerwald. It is clear that the foundation of the Guild of Au around 1650, by whomever, could not have taken place without (at least) the tacit consent of the valley community and its officials. It would be interesting to know if there was an official or unofficial agreement between the community and the early guild; it is, in any case, remarkable that the alleged founder of the guild, Michael Beer, was the son-in-law and the brother-in-law of two consecutive Landammanns.Footnote 78 In all likelihood, direct records of such an agreement will never be uncovered. Indirectly, however, such an agreement is not only strongly implied by the community’s earlier history, but also by what happened more than half a century after the guild’s foundation. At that time, the Guild of Au was in a major crisis and had a hard time realizing its role as a regulatory institution for mobility control. The political community was trying to bring it back on track; this time by taking over direct control.
The context for this was a regime change in the Bregenzerwald at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The rebellions of the so-called Common Man [Gemeiner Mann] had brushed away the established political elite; almost all members of the communal council were replaced and a new Landammann was elected.Footnote 79 This new Landammann was Johann Jacob Rüeff and he was not only intent on taking over control in the political community of the Bregenzerwald. He also wanted to streamline the Guild of Au to his new regime’s interests and, for this, took advantage of the fact that the guild was having some serious troubles with having the journeyman licenses they issued for their apprentices accepted on construction sites. This meant that bricklayers, stone cutters, and carpenters trained in the guild were, in fact, not accepted as fully trained artisans by potential employers. This was a problem for both the artisans and the master builders or architects from the Bregenzerwald who heavily relied on these very artisans as the work force for the realization of their projects. In February 1707, Rüeff went to Innsbruck to have the building craftsmen from the Bregenzerwald incorporated into the high guild [Hauptlade] of Innsbruck as a “quarter-guild” [Viertellade] and get them new statutes and a new seal. In an official confirmation document from 19 February 1707, the Bregenzerwald bricklayers and stonecutters stated, or were made to state, “that up until then they had not been organized as a guild” [vorhero … nit zunfftmässig gewässen Footnote 80] and had only gained this status by their Landammann’s recent actions.Footnote 81
Unsurprisingly, major conflicts ensued. That the Guild of Au, by the Landammann’s influence, had been broken up, with the bricklayers and the stonecutters being transferred to the neighboring village of Schnepfau and the carpenters farther away to the village of Andelsbuch, was not the main problem. More was at stake; the self-image of the Guild of Au was threatened. Christian Thumb, the Zunftmeister [guildmaster] and probably the most prolific instructor of apprentices in the history of the Guild of Au, did his best to fight against the new order imposed by Rüeff. Thumb had only asked the Landammann, he claimed publicly and emphatically, to get a more universally accepted seal from Innsbruck or elsewhere. But neither he nor any other guildsman had ever authorized the Landammann to establish a new guild with new statutes. There had already been one for more than half a century! Thumb’s protest, however, was soon cut short by the Landammann who warned him that he, the Zunftmeister, would be expelled from the guild.Footnote 82 Other not so famous, but quite outspoken critics of the new situation announced in a tavern in the village of Schnepfau that their Landammann should take his new seal and “shove it up the bottom” [in den Hinderen truckhen].Footnote 83 Their claim of having been too drunk to be responsible for their proclamations could not save them from trial and conviction.
From now on, the guild was effectively being integrated into the political community of the Bregenzerwald. In apprenticeship certificates, the Landammann was now called “the craft’s chairman” [des handwerckhs obmann Footnote 84]; he issued these charters with the guild’s new seal and his own. When, in 1720, problems arose once again for some forty building craftsmen who had not been admitted to working on construction sites because doubts had arisen concerning their membership in a legitime guild, the scribe of the political community of the Bregenzerwald would be the one to take care of things. He wrote to the guild’s officials and requested that they hand in the respective documents to overcome this “dire need” [höchste noth] and, thus, to foster “the fatherland’s profit” [des vatterlands nuzen].Footnote 85 The everyday administration of the guild was more than ever controlled by the political authorities. On the back of a 1714 apprenticeship certificate, accordingly, a councilor wrote: “This is a copy or transcript which, at the above date, the community’s scribe sent here which was sealed here, an apprenticeship certificate can be produced in this fashion” [Das ist aine Copo oder abschrifft so her land schriber am obigen datum her in geschickht und hir besiglet worden, kan auff gleiche wiß ain lehrbrief gestellt werden].Footnote 86 This meant that the Guild of Au, henceforth, had to issue their apprenticeship certificates according to a prototype fashioned by their political authority. We also have evidence that the community took care to escort craftsmen when they were going to the big construction sites abroad; and the community was also the go-to institution for outside architects or building contractors who were reaching out to propose employment opportunities for the building craftsmen.Footnote 87 In the early eighteenth century, the guild officially became what, in the eyes of the political authorities, it had most certainly always been: an instrument carrying out the interests of the community officials to regulate and foster seasonal migration to prevent permanent emigration from the Bregenzerwald.
Conclusions and Prospects
Impressive and suggestive though the Au Tutorials are, considering evidence from the bottom-up political realities of the Bregenzerwald strongly suggests that the Guild of Au was not an academy of teacher-architects and student-artisans concerned with the diffusion of architectural knowledge. It must be reimagined in its relation to the valley community of the Bregenzerwald. Knowing, first, that before the founding of the guild in the 1650s mobility control and the control of associations of artisans was of major importance to the officials of the political community, and second, that at the beginning of the eighteenth century the guild became directly controlled by the political officials, leaves hardly any doubt about that. Worth mentioning here is Mack Walker’s well-known observation that very often in early modern German towns “guilds of the town were directly and constitutionally involved in town government.”Footnote 88 Walker highlights “the guilds in their connective functions between citizens and community.”Footnote 89 This very much resonates with our findings in the rural community of the Bregenzerwald. There are, however, major differences. While, according to Walker, there was a tendency in German towns to make the guilds “part of the communal system of authority,”Footnote 90 in the Bregenzerwald, officials representing the Guild of Au were never actively integrated into the political system, but, eventually, transformed into a tool of political power wielded by others. And while in German towns the integration of guilds into the political system tended to make them sclerotic and “unsuited to economic growth and social mobility,”Footnote 91 promoting and stabilizing mobility was the raison d’être of the interaction between political authorities and the Guild of Au. What seems clear, so far, is that concern with mobility control will help us understand why the Bregenzerwald’s most remote and most mountainous village Au, with Schoppernau, became home to the building craftsmen’s guild. Unlike the rest of the Bregenzerwald, this region had been experiencing demographic stagnation since the beginning of the seventeenth century.Footnote 92 Obviously, permanent emigration played a major role in this. We know this because of the records of Matthäus Beer, who, in the mid-seventeenth century, served there as parish priest for decades. In 1656, when he wrote down records in his capacity as a provider of pastoral and sacramental services since arriving in Au in 1639, he calculated that he had performed thirty-nine requiems in absentia, because the respective people had moved abroad twenty or more years earlier and nobody had heard from them since.Footnote 93 That is an impressive one-eighth of all requiems at this time. Here, an institution such as the Guild of Au would be especially necessary to stop the demographic drain by transforming undesirable permanent emigration into seasonal migration.
It was most likely in this context that Michael Beer and others were encouraged, in the mid-seventeenth century, to build up guild structures for the artisans. Luckily, this coincided with the beginning of the Southwestern German Baroque building boom, which provided new possibilities to the craftsmen and their families to survive, in the Bregenzerwald, on a modest but steady income. Fascinatingly, this resulted in remarkable shifts in the social structure of Au, including the emergence of a surprisingly extensive middle class, which was relatively independent in the seventeenth century from income generated in agricultural activities. In fact, we even have evidence that by the end of the seventeenth century, more than half of the town’s households could subsist without raising cattle.Footnote 94
These, and other elements of sociopolitical life in the Bregenzerwald must have played a major part in the foundation and organization of the Guild of Au. And once again, it is Joseph Willi whose life suggests that considering the sociopolitical realities of the Bregenzerwald is more than simply reconstructing an interesting, but essentially irrelevant local backstory of Baroque building culture. It includes understanding that within these sociopolitical realities, there was the potential for the diffusion of big ideas (and not just in the fantastical world of an educational guild which, allegedly, made the Bregenzerwald some kind of “rustic Florence”).Footnote 95 Joseph Willi, at any rate, when being interrogated in June 1709, also slipped in a very interesting remark that attests to this. He told his interrogators that, on one of his trips back home to the Bregenzerwald, he had hidden “a book called Five Pillars Book [Five Architectural Orders Book] under a woodpile at his mother’s” [ain buoch fünff seülen buch genant unter die scheiterbeig bey seiner mutter].Footnote 96 Of course, it would be a great stretch of the historical imagination to argue that it was not Caspar Moosbrugger or another architectural genius, but Joseph Willi who brought the printed copy of a book with specific architectural information with him which was then manually copied and incorporated into the Au Tutorials. Yet this clue, taken from an insignificant craftsman’s life from below the usual perceptions of art history, should make us aware that social history, cultural history, or history of everyday life must be considered when it comes to understanding the Bregenzerwald Baroque Master Builders. Not only because such approaches are interesting in their own right—which they are—but also because they may help us see that even rather sophisticated forms of architectural knowledge need not always be conveyed in a top-down fashion by famous architects in an academy-like craftsmen’s guild. Instead, it could perhaps be distributed by highly unlikely agents, even by someone as unlikely as the failed bricklayer’s apprentice Joseph Willi.
Open access
