ABSTRACT
In 1753 the Upper-Palatine painter, Johann Lidman (c.1716-97), completed a commission for the parish church at Perschen, a stout thirteenth-century building by the banks of the Naab. His fresco on the arch of the sanctuary featured a colourful cohort of both well-known and obscure saints: the church patrons, Peter and Paul, Aquilinus, a tenth-century priestly martyr, Carlo Borromeo, the sixteenth century archbishop of Milan, St Tosso, an eighth-century monk, bishop of Augsburg and martyr, St John Nepomuk, the fourteenth-century Czech martyr canonised in 1729, St William the Great, a twelfth-century pilgrim and hermit, the Venerable Johannes Sarkander, a seventeenth-century recatholiciser of Moravia and martyr, St Ivo, a late-thirteenth-century Breton priest, and finally Wolfholdus, an eleventhcentury Bavarian monk who would be beatified in 1766. The Perschen ensemble has been called a ‘kaleidoscope of the Counter Reformation and recatholicisation, a heaven full of representatives of theology, popular saints, and everyday patrons’.1 Aquilinus for example was a plague saint, Wolfholdus a protector against storms, lightning and hail; to outsiders they might have been strange figures in comparison with the universally known Borromeo, but to the community which commissioned the fresco they were equally meaningful.
