Maniera greca in Europe's catholic East: on identities of images in Lithuania and Poland (1380s-1720s)

ENThe book explores objects that qualified as Greek, functioned within the Catholic milieu of Lithuania and Poland. Topically quite narrow, this inquiry spans a period of almost four centuries and has a broad geographical range. The study focuses on perceptions of and preconceptions about Greek images among Eastern European Catholics from the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth century. Concentrating on Greekness as manifested in encounters between the visual and the verbal, the research asks how images assume identities and acquire values. Without denying its descriptive nature, the book employs the notion of the ‘Greek manner’ as a critical concept denoting a register of thought charged with othering. Hence, the Greekness of images is addressed with an aim at estimating the scale and circumstance of visual otherness and revealing the meanings retrospectively attached to this notion. The entire study has been prompted by the remnants of Byzantine wall paintings unveiled in the parish church of Trakai in Lithuania in 2006. These murals stimulated a search for scenarios of artistic practices, posing questions of mute sources, revising established patterns of art historical narrative, and rethinking the understanding and roles of confession in the cultural history of Eastern Europe. Back in 2006, looking at the revealed fragments, I was confused by the fact that seeing these Greek paintings known from seventeenth-century sources I was unable to situate them within any historically and geographically proximate artistic milieu. My attempts to relate the paintings in Trakai to other known murals exposed and widened gaps between the visual and the verbal: on the one hand, I knew other examples of contemporaneous Byzantine paintings in Lithuania and Poland; on the other hand, parallels between them were merely circumstantial, without any specific resonance as to style or iconography.The attribution and contextualization of the wall paintings in Trakai demanded the pursuit of a hypothesis that seemed professionally illogical and led to a circular discussion with visual and written evidence as well as scholarship. It was at this point that the metaphor of a loop emerged as a reflective tool and the binding principle of the research indicating alteration through repetition and appropriation through reduction. The book consists of case studies based on evidence of varied genre and chronology, whose message permeates cultural hybridity. The principal research assumption maintains that hybridity is culture’s latent state preserved in every medium, but disguised and filtered by discourse. Hence, I claim that written sources not only represent aspects of lived reality by reduction, but also purify them from contradictions by ascribing singularized meanings. This practice of purification is particular not only to master narratives, but also to historical records and scholarly literature. Hence, by tracing the dynamics of Greek manner and its derivatives in images and records of the past, this study rethinks how cultural identities and affiliations are constituted and sameness maintained [p. 18-19].

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• The Oxford history of Poland-Lithuania. Vol. 1. The making of the Polish-Lithuanian union, 1385-1569. New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2015. XXI, 592 p.
• Words for images: on perceptions of ‘Greek manner’ in Lithuania and Poland. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: history, memory, legacy. New York ; London : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. P. 60-137.