Stove tile

The rectangular tile is decorated with a high relief decoration of St Luke with his attribute, an ox. To the left in the background is a castle. The figure is set in a circle in the upper part of the circle is an empty field, enclosed by roll-work. A cherub's head is in each upper corner. Painted in blue, brown, green, ochre and white. In the course of research it emerged that this tile was part of a stove made by Thomas Strobl of Salzburg. The stove, which has only partly survived, (now in the Esztergom Keresztény Museum), was decorated with biblical scenes. During its reconstruction we followed the division of a stove into two parts made by the same master (now in the collection of the Vienna Museum für Angewandte Kunst). The restorers have fitted another tile, once in the collection of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, into the upper part. This depicted the scene of Tobias and the Angel. However, the St Luke tile described above could not be fitted into the scheme of the stove nor did the restorers have the necessary information to be able to reconstruct the other missing tiles. There are two coats of arms on the stove: those of Tobias Untelholzer and of his wife, Lasser von Lassereg Margarethe. The date of their wedding (27th December 1569) can be taken as the approximate date of manufacture of the stove and the frieze.