Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 1. (2019)
István Karácsony: Date noi privind elementele de amenajare interioară ale bisericii reformate din Fântânele
Date noi privind elementele de amenajare interioarä ale bisericii reformate din Fäntänele 161 significant. Examples to be mentioned here are the painted coffered ceiling placed in the nave of the church in 1782, along with the Southern portico, erected in 1835 and 1836. Between 1980 and 1983 an extensive restoration took place, accounting for the largest action of this type in the recent history of the building. The ecclesiastical building valued primarily due to its mural paintings (to be discussed by the author of this study in a forthcoming paper), also raises other questions pertaining to art history, along with the problems identified by specialists in the second part of the 20th century. The advances in the research of the Transylvanian built heritage over the past decades resulted in an extensive amount of new data, thus, widening the perspectives of the analysis of the Calvinist church from Fäntänele. Therefore, we find it necessary to make several corrections to a previously formulated theory concerning the authorship of the church’s coffered ceiling. Contrary to the idea presented in 1945 by the historian Lajos Kelemen, one cannot make a well-supported argument for the association between this feature and the painter János Képíró of Egerháza. Moreover, the recent comprehensive examination of the Transylvanian painted coffered ceilings revealed a close analogy for the studied piece in Ormenis (Mures County), where the painted panels were reused as simple wooden material in the church attic. A tight morphologic and chromatic relationship between the two ceilings is supporting the idea that the ceiling from Fäntänele might be the work of a painter-carpenter belonging to the group of masters from the Sighisoara region. In addition to the aforementioned revising task, our paper also tries to contribute to the research of the history of the Calvinist church from Fäntänele by using unpublished archival material, in order to shed light on the less spectacular but important aspects in the outline of a detailed evolution of the researched building. Therefore, we deemed it essential to focus on the main moments of the interior remodeling of the church during the 19lh and 20th centuries, by studying the erection of the tribunes in the 1800s, the acquisition of the first organ in 1810, the frequent restorations of the benches in 1836, 1840, and 1841, the building of the Lord’s table in 1844, and the renovation of the pulpit’s sounding board in 1884.
