EN
Concentration of the written and pictorial sources on the Reutter family of Banská Štiavnica forms the material part of the study, which aims not only at critical analysis, but also at an effort to reconstruct the culture and experience of a representative Central European individual in the late 16th and first half of the 17th centuries. The text also attempts to grasp the methodological possibilities for interpreting historical sources reflecting the cultural experience of the urban Lutheran elites in the mining towns of central Slovakia, especially with regard for models of patronage, and not only in the field of fine art and craft, but also of early modern education and literature. The study also tries to answer the question of whether the historiography of art offers a viable and open way to interpret the form and meaning of contemporary culture for a specific person from a particular social group, if we work with textual sources or only with a limited sample of surviving works coming mainly from artistic crafts rather than high art.