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Abstract
This dissertation examines the work of artists---nearly all of German origin---who migrated to Sweden during and after the turbulent years of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), where they established a vibrant new artistic center. Stockholm thus gained an artistic standing commensurate with its tremendous international stature attained during the reigns of King Gustaf II Adolf and Queen Christina. The underlying thesis is that early modern German art as it is understood today is a fragment defined by later political boundaries. Since the nineteenth century the Scandinavian courts have been considered independently, largely because the beginnings of academic art-historical writing coincided with a tremendous rise in national sentiment in northern Europe in the later nineteenth century. The arts produced there were cast as reflections of a national character, even though they were the work of painters and sculptors from outside of the kingdom. They have thus been left out of a broader historiography concerned with German culture as a whole---an absence that has left the Scandinavian courts adrift and the perception of German art in the seventeenth century poorer. In cultural terms, then, Stockholm and Copenhagen are here considered the northernmost of a fundamentally related group of courts also including Vienna, Munich, Prague, Dresden and Berlin.
The core of the work is an extended study of the career of the architect Nicodemus Tessin (1615-1681), demonstrating how an ambitious talent from Germany could have an important career in this period. Tessin began his career as a fortifications engineer, but soon turned primarily to civil architecture, and built a number of important buildings around the kingdom of Sweden. Joachim von Sandrart includes a short biography of him in the Teutsche Academie , and discusses several of his palaces. The influential architectural theorist Leonhard Christoph Sturm promoted some of Tessin's work as a model for princely architecture, and the topographical survey Suecia antiqua et hodierna ensured a broad circulation of his ideas. Through these means, Tessin's work and the general cultural legacy of the Stockholm court found an audience outside of the kingdom, but almost exclusively within the Holy Roman Empire.
