Investigations into the Ancient Portals at Tirol Castle and Zenoburg

On the two ancient portals of the castle chapel and church vestibule at Tirol Castle, and on the ancient church portal at Zenoburg.

The three aforementioned monuments from an early era shrouded in mythical darkness have already been evaluated multiple times from a historical and antiquarian perspective, and many an attempt to interpret their pictorial representations has failed, or at least has not provided convincing clarification. It may therefore be of particular interest to hear the following observation of a third party, who judges from a purely technical standpoint, all the more so as his very natural view strongly contradicts many a previous ingenious interpretation:

Mr. Johann Jordan, civil engineer in Meran, who was requested by the Ferdinandeum to compare on site with the originals the existing older drawings of the aforementioned monuments, about whose accuracy some doubts prevailed, has taken the meritorious trouble of providing new and exceedingly faithful drawings of them and has just presented them as a gift to the Ferdinandeum, accompanied by technical observations. In them, Mr. Jordan successfully demonstrates that none of the three portals were originally designed by architects as they stand today, nor were their individual components once crafted for their present purpose, and that consequently the whole cannot form a coherent representation, but rather that these three much-discussed portals are nothing more than mixta-composita composed of fragments of ancient structures, partly perhaps from collapsed sections of the castles of Tirol and Zenoberg, and in any case originating in their individual parts from entirely different periods; these fragments were likely gathered by one or more medieval master builders and assembled by them, as well as their form permitted, without any further intention than to form a decorated arch. Therefore, no other merit is due to them than the gratitude for having saved from total destruction, in this manner, these ancient fragments, whose relief figures may now be individually explained by archaeologists and assigned, according to their meaning, to the pagan or Christian era.