St Peter at Novo Mesto Zelinsko: New Iconography for Claiming Political Continuity

This paper analyses the course of changes that followed the arival of new beneficiaries in a church of St Peter. At first it was a part of a Templar estate on the Lands of St Martin. With the abolition of the Templar order most of the Templars joined the Hospitallers. Upon the latters’ takeover of the church, the existing architecture was used as a medium for the expression of the new owner’s ideas mostly through the legend of St Ladislaus represented on the north nave wall. The architecture and architectural sculpture were retained as a framework for the display of the ideas of the new owners closely cooperating with the new rulers of the country and their interests. The church, built with one purpose in mind, was reused for a new cycle of ideological and artistic display – from the Romanesque to the Gothic, from the plain (or plain decorative) to figurative representation, from the Templars to the Hospitallers, from the Arpadian to the Angevins.