Anastasis: Research in Medieval Culture and Art (Nov 2014)
The Art of the Portrait in the Religious Painting of Wallachia and Moldavia in the 15th – 17th centuries
Abstract
Beyond the diversity of the forms of socio-economic and cultural-artistic development, at the end of the 14th century, Wallachia, Moldavia and the knights of Romanian origins of Transylvania, Banat and Maramureş were gathered in one single system, with feudality institutions of Occidental inspiration, but with mostly Orthodox spirituality, a system that is permanently struggling to find the perfect equilibrium between the Islamic-Ottoman expansionism and the insistent conversion actions of Western Catholicism. Medieval painting promoted the portrait as an artistic genre beyond the canonical constraints of the painting of Byzantine inspiration. The votive portrait of the founder did no necessarily reproduce the individual features of the portrayed person, not even in the last period, when the artistic and technical evolutions could initiate tendencies to a desacralization of the religious themes. The introduction of the portrait reflecting the social class in the Court of the two Romanian Countries through the Central – European sources of Austria, Hungary or Poland produced a major change in the aesthetics of the portrait when the artist came to have a new vision on the way he rendered the physical features and later the mental experiences of the model, sometimes making use of an obvious descriptive exactness in rendering the physical features, the physiognomy of the portrayed person. Just like in the medieval votive portrait, in the case of easel portraits, the artist focused on the representation of external features, according to the social importance and rank of the portrayed person. Gradually, the evolution of the corresponding capture of the physical features, initially sufficient, went up from a qualitative point of view to complete this first effort with a precious performance of the expression of the spiritual characteristics of the portrayed character, insistently claimed by both the artist and the contemplator.
