Anna Chromy - Cloak of Conscience (Salzburg)

 sculpture, interesting place

The sculpture is removed deep into the arched vault. Even on a bright day, the statue is always in the shade and creates a pressing and oppressive impression. Sculptor Anna Chromy.
“Cloak of Conscience” is a gigantic sculpture four and a half meters high, made of precious white marble. There is a brilliant work on the territory of the Salzburg Cathedral, one of the oldest Catholic churches in Austria. The author of the work “Cloak of Conscience” was a 60-year-old Czech woman, a talented sculptor, Anna Chromi. After the publication of her work to the whole world, Anna becomes the recognized genius and the first woman in the history of sculpture to receive the priceless Michelangelo Prize, which is awarded annually only to the greatest masters of stone art. All kinds of variations of the Cloak of Conscience creation are popular all over the world - they adorn the Estates Theater in Prague and the National Archaeological Museum in the capital of the Olympic Games, Athens. The masterpiece gained its loud popularity thanks to the talented performance of living lines and forms from inanimate, cold stone, more precisely marble. A rare breed of white marble was mined in a closed conservation area of ​​the Italian city of Carrara, the only place on the planet where you can extract pure, crystal white marble. The quarry in which marble was mined is an inaccessible place for a mere mortal attraction, named after the great Michelangelo, who brought marble from these places for his famous sculpture of David. Meanwhile, the most famous works of the ancient Romans are also made of white marble, formed in the quarry of Carrara. The story of the Salzburg “Cloak of Conscience” by Anna Khromi began in the mid-nineties of the twentieth century, when a talented artist gets into a serious accident and loses her ability to paint. Her solid character and ingenious mindset allows her to transfer all her strength to sculpture. Having worked a couple of years with stone material, the idea comes to her to embody the painted picture of the Cloak of Conscience in three-dimensional space. Having received permission to mine a 250-ton single piece of marble from a forbidden quarry, work begins on the most important work in the life of Chromi. The giant section of marble was extremely difficult to transport in continuous volume along the narrow and winding quarry roads. When the master received a precious monolith in her hands, it took her five years of painstaking work to create an ingenious creation from a silent stone. The “Cloak of Conscience” has a final weight of forty-five tons, with a height of four meters seventy centimeters, which is slightly less than the five-meter sculpture of David, the work of Michelangelo’s hands. Anna's work depicts a solid white fabric with many folds that covers the alleged figure of a man sitting with bent legs at the knees. In place of the person’s face covered with the “Cloak of Conscience” there is a void, into which light is sometimes passed for a deeper effect from the installation. Between the folds of stone fabric there is an entrance to the inside of the sculpture, which is hollow inside. In the middle of the "Cloak" can accommodate several people. A popular incarnation of Anna Chromi can be found in many artworks, such as The Conscience of the World, where hundreds of cloaks are depicted in the colors of the flag. In addition, the miniature “Raincoats” can be bought as a present in souvenir shops.