Damnatio memoriae. A Historical and Moral Revenge in Images
Damnatio memoriae. A Historical and Moral Revenge in Images

Summary/Abstract: The article suggestively called Damnatio memoriae. Historical andmoral revenge in images is considering the analysis of a cultural, historical andartistic phenomenon practiced since ancient times in different cultures andcivilizations, which literally consists in condemning the memory of certainremarkable personalities of the past, by deleting the names of the inscriptions,respectively by deteriorating, marking with distinctive signs (blackout,scribbling, etc.) or even completely destroying the images that representedthem. As we will try to demonstrate, this kind of practice has a strong ethicalconnotation, offering, besides a series of genuine documents about historicalevents, a moralizing example based on a certain type of ideology specific tothe space where they originated.Our work proposes to exemplify such a case, originating from the 16thcentury in Moldavia, referring to the personality and visual representations ofPrince Iliaş who appears in various artistic representations, such as the votivepaintings of Humor, Baia, Moldoviţa and Probota .It is worth noting from the beginning that the act of condemningmemory was most often done as a sign of an epoch-end (dictatorship) and thebeginning of a new one in which the recollection of the tyrant (or of thatparticular personality) was destroyed, and the images that reminded of himwere vandalized. As history shows, when such a phenomenon took place,hatred of the dictators of the periods of sad remembrance was reflected, mostof the time, upon the works of art that they represented, or the documents thatmentioned them, without taking into any account the importance, value, costsor efforts made to achieve them.

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