Debates around the Greek image had narrowed its positive meanings to true testimony of the Christian past, pushing negative associations into oblivion. The solution to the conflict between good pictures and erroneous people was reached by ignoring the schism as far as it concerned images. The authority of the authorless Greek images stemmed from their antiquity, yet this past had to be updated to maintain its relevance for the concerns of the present. Stories, remakes, processions, and their combinations were undertaken to make the past present, display the antiquity of images, assure their identity, and strengthen prestige. All this required effort as well as determination until faith and miracles sustained the tradition. This third part of the book focuses on how the tradition of up-to-date antiquity was maintained through the transformations of the architecture and interior of the Trakai church and how narratives assisted in this project. The centuries-long process of making the past current is seen herein as a set of consecutive visual translations that joined together iconoclast and iconodule strategies to preserve the Greek identity of paintings. The transformations across visual and verbal media also translocated stories from Europe's south to receptive northern minds that found them apt to explain the sameness of visually alien images.

Church turned eastwards, minds directed westwards

Around 1500, murals in the Byzantine style were still extant in Poland and Lithuania; however, the demand for Greek paintings in Catholic churches expired with the last Jagiellonian commission from 1470. Apparently, skilful painters were available and Orthodox churches continued being decorated;1 however, wall paintings seized a traversal of the confessional divide.