Wojsław Molè: między Strzygowskim a Rieglem i Dvořákiem
Wojsław Molè: between Strzygowski and Riegl with Dvořák

Summary/Abstract: As a scholar, Mole did not set up a new system or method of research; nevertheless, hewas an undeniable founder of the Cracow milieu of medievalists and Byzantinists.Wojsław (Vojeslav) Mole (1886-1973) was a poet, literary critic, Slavist and art historian. In Poland he is mainly known as the founder of the academic history of Byzantine art. In 1906 he started studies in Slavonic languages, law and Romance philology at the University ofVienna,later continued at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1908/1909), in Rome (1909/1910) and finally in Vienna, where he graduated in art history (1910-1912). In the Viennese period the young scholar was particularly influenced by Max Dvorak and Joseph Strzygowski. The latter supervised Moles doctoral dissertation dealing with a seventeenth-century copy of Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes (Eine illustrierte Handschrift aus dem Jahre 1649 mit der Topographie des Kosmas Indikopleustes und dem Hexameron des bulgarischen Exarchen Johannes. Ein Beitrag zur spatbyzantinischen Kunstgeschichte, 1922). Mole was especially attracted by Strzygowskis idea about the crucial importance of the artistic centres of Hellenistic Orient - Antioch, Alexandria and Ephesus - for early Byzantine art. He did not, however, share Strzygowskis later views, but repeatedly returned to his professor s early works, stating that, ‘The beginnings and development of Christian art cannot be understood at all without taking Iranian art into account’.1 Mole often reiterated Strzygowskis ideas in his first and most important book, Historia sztuke starochrześcijańskiej i wczesnobizantyńskiej [‘The History of Paleo-Christian and Early Byzantine Art’, 1931]. Yet, it was Max Dvorak to whom Mole owed his first professional positions, namely: a year-long postdoctoral (habilitation) fellowship in Italy and a post at the central institute for the protection of historie monuments (Zentralkommission fur die Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und historischen Denkmale). The outbreak of the First World War had suddenly interrupted the developing professional stability of Mole, who volunteered to the army. But his actual involvement in the military was brief, as he was captured by the Russians and was detained in a complex of POW camps in the vicinity of Tomsk in Siberia. After release, he habilitated at the university of Tomsk with a dissertation on the Stroganov print collection. In the summer of 1920, Mole returned to Ljubljana where he started to work at the then newly founded university as a docent of ancient and Byzantine art history, and five years later was given professorship there. However, the next years, up until his retirement, Mole spent at the Jagiellonian Universityin Cracow, where he moved in the 1925/26 academic year, with a break in the years 1939-1945 when, after the war-time wanderings, he had been living in Ljubljana. In Cracow, until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he had been the head of the Chair of Art History of the Slavonic Nations, sińce 1937 acting simultaneously as the director of the Slavonic Studies. He was active also within the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, first as the editor-in-chief of the “Przegląd Historii Sztuki” [‘Review of Art History’] (1930-1933) and then, sińce 16 April 1933, as the corresponding member of the Philological Faculty. At that time he was unąuestionably the founder of Polish studies in Byzantine art history, and particularly its Slavonic division. For the needs of the Byzantine art seminary run by him, Mole had created a specialist library, later incorporated into the library of the Art History Institute of the Jagiellonian University. Further, he had initiated a systematic research on the Byzantine mural paintings founded by the rulers from the Jagiellonian dynasty. After the war, at the beginning of the 1945/1946 academic year, Mole returned to Cracow and had been teaching at the Jagiellonian University till his retirement in 1960. He spent his last years, 1966-1973, in Eugene, OR, in the USA, where he died on 5 December 1973. The socio-political situation in Poland in the first decades after the Second World War must have been very demanding for a scholar actively pursuing research, who must have been confronted with uneasy choices. Mole had not become the eulogist of the new political system, nor had he fallen victim to the ‘Hegelian bite’ or had been attracted by the pro-social rhetoric of the peoples government. Still before the war, he several times voiced his critical opinions on the Soviet writings on art theory, reproaching them with mechanical transposition of categories and criteria from economic materialism to the domain of art Sciences. Even his book, Sztuka rosyjska do roku 1914 [‘Russian Art until 1914’], published in 1955, cannot be treated as a sort of tribute paid to the new political system, as in fact, in it he had introduced the notions of medieval Ruthenia and its artistic relations with Byzantium to the Polish scholarly world. Teaching was Moles most important activity at that period. In the subseąuent series of his university lectures he had outlined a generał humanistic perspective of all issues in late antiąue, medieval and early modern art, discussed by him in detail. He underscored the universal meaning of humanism, which he derived from ancient Greece and its ideal of kalokagathia and the heroising of man, transposed in the medieval Byzantium in the sphere of the intangible ideas of sanctity and God’s incarnation.2 At that time he wrote that ‘The most characteristic feature of medieval art in its Byzantine form, its pure spiritual humanism, is not of Eastern but of late-antique Greek-Hellenistic origin, and similarly Byzantium is by no means the East’. Moles lasting contribution to Polish art historiography was the introduction of the research on Orthodox artistic heritage into the scope of the art-historical investigation of Polish art, making this area an indispensable part of the discipline and ‘a complement to the panorama of medieval artistic culture of the Polish State’, as he had put it in a short chapter of a three-volume edition of Historia sztuki w Polsce [‘The History of Art in Poland’].

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