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Introduction; or an eye in the debris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2023

Giedré Mickunaite
Affiliation:
Vilniaus Universitetas, Lithuania
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Summary

Abstract: The Church Councils of Constance, Basel, Ferrara-Florence and Trent, the fall of Constantinople and the victory of Lepanto are the events that constitute the pan-European political framework of this inquiry concerned with notions and functions of ‘Greek’ image in Lithuania and Poland. The review of the understanding and treatment of Greek manner in scholarship highlights consistent implications of difference and retrospect. The choice of an intertextual approach to establish patterns of the vernacularization and alienation of images is substantiated through the discussion of available primary evidence, comparative materials from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as art historical literature. The overview of confessional polemics emphasizes division between Greek people and Greek images in the eyes of early modern Catholics.

Keywords: Greek image, Christian confessions, hybridity, visual vernacular, postcolonial theory, intertextual theory

The image of an eye on the cover of this book is both a subject of and a metonym for the research presented herein. A photograph of a painted piece of plaster, a part of a face, of a human figure, and of mural decoration, this eye represents a knot in a web of references to the production of and relations with images across time. Yet this web could be abridged to one word ‘an eye’, or ‘a fragment’, or a combination of both. The phrase ‘fragment with an eye’ categorizes the object as a remnant and by doing so announces the research which attempts at providing broken pieces with a kind of prostatic body of art historical narrative. The framework of this book is built on the binaries of visual and verbal media, of Catholic and Orthodox confessions, as well as of persons and things and attempts at rendering hybridity, which had not been articulated at the time of the production of the images discussed herein. In the broadest sense, this study is a kind of rescue expedition, which aspires to save fragmented as well as semantically mixed images from neglect. By the same token, the research acknowledges the creative power of oblivion, herein understood as a prerequisite for and a vehicle of cultural order and continuity. Hence, the inquiry, whose key instrument is a looking eye, binds the scattered fragments into a narrative and inscribes them into the history of art. More narrowly, this is an object-based study of images qualified as Greek by their past or present viewers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Maniera Greca in Europe's Catholic East
On Identities of Images in Lithuania and Poland (1380s-1720s)
, pp. 17 - 38
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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