🇩🇪 バンベルクのミトライ
ドイツ · イーゴル・ミトライの公共彫刻
ユネスコ世界遺産に登録されたバンベルクの旧市街に流れるレグニッツ川に架かるウンテレ・ブリュッケ（下橋）には、ミトライのチェントゥリオーネ Iが永久設置されています。中世の橋と現代彫刻の対話はバンベルクの象徴的な景観となっています。
主要作品と設置場所
- チェントゥリオーネ I — ウンテレ・ブリュッケ（下橋）· 永久設置
Cast in bronze, Centurione I belongs to a series of Roman soldier figures that Mitoraj developed extensively during the 1980s and 1990s, when demand from European public institutions grew significantly alongside his gallery market. The Bamberg installation, permanent since the late 1990s, was facilitated through the city's cultural administration and reflects a broader pattern of German civic investment in his monumental work during that decade.
The Centurione series, of which the Bamberg figure is one iteration, was cast at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia in Milan, the foundry Mitoraj used consistently for his larger bronzes from the mid-1980s onward. Collectors seeking related works on the secondary market should note that smaller Centurione variants, typically ranging from 40 to 80 centimetres, appear periodically at auction through houses including Dorotheum and Bonhams, where they have achieved prices between €15,000 and €60,000 depending on provenance and casting date.
The placement of Centurione I on Bamberg's Untere Brücke follows a curatorial logic Mitoraj favoured throughout his career: positioning fragmented figures at sites already carrying accumulated historical weight. Bamberg's UNESCO designation, granted in 1993, made the city a natural fit for this approach, and the installation predates similar civic commissions in Kraków and Agrigento that would consolidate his reputation for site-responsive monumental work during the early 2000s.
Mitoraj's relationship with German collectors deepened considerably after a 1998 retrospective held at the Städtische Galerie Würzburg, which introduced his fragmented bronze vocabulary to a regional audience already familiar with the Bamberg installation. Works from that exhibition, including smaller Testa di Centauro editions, subsequently entered private Bavarian collections and occasionally reappear through Munich-based dealer Hampel Fine Art Auctions, where condition reports consistently note the importance of foundry stamps in establishing casting sequence and corresponding value.
Mitoraj's work entered the German auction market most visibly through Ketterer Kunst, the Munich-based house that handled several bronze editions during the 2000s, including fragments from the Testa Addormentata and Eros Bendato series. German private collectors, particularly those in Bavaria, were early institutional supporters, and a number of mid-scale bronzes from the 1990s remain in regional foundations rather than public circulation, limiting their appearance at auction and sustaining price stability for the editions that do emerge.
Mitoraj's bronze technique evolved markedly between his earlier Centurione castings and the larger civic commissions of the late 1990s, with surface patination becoming an increasingly deliberate compositional element rather than an incidental finish. The Bamberg Centurione I displays the warm, variegated oxidation characteristic of Battaglia's cold-patina process, a quality that distinguishes period casts from later authorized editions and carries meaningful weight for collectors assessing authenticity. Works bearing this foundry's stamp alongside Mitoraj's signature and a documented casting year consistently command premiums of fifteen to twenty percent over undocumented examples at comparable auction estimates.