ИСТРАЖИВАЧКИ НЕМИРИ И ИСКУШЕЊА МИРОСЛАВА ТИМОТИЈЕВИЋА: КА СЕМИОТИЦИ СРПСКЕ КУЛТУРЕ
INVESTIGATIVE UNREST AND TEMPTATIONS OF MIROSLAV TIMOTIJEVIĆ: TOWARDS THE SEMIOTICS OF SERBIAN CULTURE

Summary/Abstract: The author analyzes the scientific opus of art historian Miroslav Timotijević and establishes the relevance of this opus for the wider set of social sciences and humanities, especially for the semiotics of Serbian culture. He questions this scientific opus within various problem and theoretical-methodological fields which Timotijević opened up in an extremely interesting and provocative way in separate phases of their development. One circle of his studies comprises monographs on Serbian churches and monasteries (St. George’s Church in Timisoara, 1996; Krušedol Monastery, 2008) and in that respect Timotijević follows the basic ideas of Pavel Florensky on the semiotic complexity of churches and monasteries, but he also takes into consideration the earlier contributions of Serbian scientists in this domain (Veljko Petrović, Milan Kašanin, Vojislav J. Đurić, Dejan Medaković, Vojislav Korać etc.), as well as the findings of the modern science of art. The second circle refers to the historiographical synthesis in the study of Serbian baroque painting (Serbian baroque painting, 1996), while his approach is prominently theoretical, poetic and iconographic, even with some elements of that type of stylistic analysis that can be connected to Heinrich Wölfflin’s idea of an artistic history ‘without names’. The third circle is connected to researching the history of daily life and privacy in the Serbian culture of the 18th century (Birth of modern privacy: Private life of Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy from the end of the 17th until the beginning of the 19th century, 2006), which places this art historian, along with his precious contribution, among those Serbian historians who sought the investigative paths and programs of Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby. After that book, however, Timotijević started choosing terminology that cannot be assessed as a progress in the study of a sensitive issue of the creation of peoples and nations: a more traditional concept that implies the triad of the concepts ‘ethnic mass’, ‘people’, and ‘nation’ is, the author of the paper believes, much more appropriate and operational than the binary model of ‘ethos’ and ‘nation’ that Timotijević completely adopted. The first triad model is more adequate for the age which strives to preserve the diversity of the world, while the second binary one is more appropriate for an age that strives to unify the world and cancel the beauty of diversity for which the age of globalism has no more sensitivity. The fourth circle is connected with the culture and politics of memory and Timotijević wrote a specific case study regarding the celebration of the holiday Serbian Palm Sunday (The Uprising of Takovo – Serbian Palm Sunday: on common public remembrance and forgettance in the symbolic politics of the official representative culture, 2012), which shows how state politics establishes not only the phenomenon of remembrance but also of forgettance within a representative culture of a social community. And, finally, the fifth circle covered by Miroslav Timotijević with his monographs refers to the study of the opus of a great painter of the baroque period (Teodor Kračun, 2019), the age to which this valuable researcher devoted the majority of his research attention. In all these fields this art historian discovered anew the hidden possibilities of innovation and progress of theoretical-methodological forms of thinking. Because of that, especially because of the knowledge he unearthed with his research, Miroslav Timotijević occupies an important and valuable place in a comprehensive semiotics of Serbian culture.

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