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The present dissertation, homage brought to the well-known oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, offers a short trip on the steps of mythology and marine fauna of the countries neighbouring the Mediterranian, focusing on Greece, the Ancient Rome and their colonies.
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In 1911 the City Museum of Technology and Industry organized two courses for bookbinders under the direction of the famous Kraków bookbinder Bonawentura Lenart. The works made during the second course, in which ten journeymen participated, were presented at the Piotr Skarga First Exhibition of Contemporary Church Art, which opened on December 7 of the same year. A total of 30 bookbinding works were exhibited - 25 were made by the course participants and 5 by Bonawentura Lenart. Comparing the list of exhibited works - bound prayer books - with today’s collections of the National Museum in Krakow, it can be said that currently 16, that is more than half of the works exhibited in 1911, are in the Museum’s collection. The article describes the covers made during the course and then presented at the exhibition.
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In the holdings of Polish churches one can find liturgical vessels and artistic metal handcraft from the 19th century, designed in historical styles. These are handcraft items made of precious metals by goldsmiths and jewellers, as well as copper and tin alloys by braziers and similar professionals. These objects were supposed to be distinguished by their material quality and exquisite workmanship from cheaper, mass-produced plated objects. Another group of metal antiques are copies of historical vessels. An increased interest in history and the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century introduced in the whole of Europe the fashion for copying artefacts that were esteemed for their historical, cultural and artistic value. The copied objects were the ones important for the history of the country or representative for the art of the region. However, the main influence on the activities of the 19th-c. masters of metalwork was exerted by the then dynamically developing collections, museums and art market. Antiques required professional repairs, which made it necessary to learn about old techniques and technologies. Unfortunately, conservation was only one step away from counterfeiting, because there was a demand for high-priced originals. As a result, a huge number of high quality forgeries of outstanding artistic and stylistic value, proving the technical virtuosity of their makers and their vast knowledge of historical design, appeared in the collectors’ market. At the turn of the 20th century, craftsmen achieved such a level of sophistication in making imitations that even experienced experts were sometimes deceived.It is not surprising, then, that the discussed antiques are often negatively perceived by contemporary art historians as derivative, pseudo-stylistic, or even forgeries. In practice, determining their age and provenance often turns out to be a difficult task, burdened with a large margin of error. Small products made of base metals in particular require careful attention, be- cause it is easy to make a mistake, identifying a product from the 19th century as an older one or vice versa, which in this article is illustrated by the example of brass and bronze censers.
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The text reviews the basic principles of the systems of extended Just intonation by Ben Johnston and the Moments of Symmetry system of Ervin Wilson. Johnston bases his system on the vector 4:5:6 and applies it both by expanding its limit up to 31 and calculating the resultant tones from the 3rd, 5th, and 7th limits. Alongside the u-tonal and o-tonal reflections, this generates multidimensional lattices that are interconnected with common tones that Johnston uses to modulate from one tonal centre to another. Ervin Wilson’s Scale tree and Moments of Symmetry come from the idea of continued fraction and graph tree. Ervin Wilson’s approach is deeply connected with Joseph Yasser’s view on the evolution of the cardinalities of the known tonal systems.
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The perception of visual artworks depends on multiple factors related to the characteristics of the object itself, the cognitive and cultural specificities of the beholder as well as the conditions of observation. In 2006, Raphael Rosenberg created the first-of-itskind Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History (CReALab), which is dedicated to eye tracking experiments through the scientific perspective of art historians. Different theoretical assessments of the field, both from ancient sources and contemporaneous studies, have been tested. There are some topics that haven’t yet been explored but could receive great benefits from this method. One of them is the iconographic language of the hands in Early Modern paintings and its multicultural perception.
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From 1968 to 1974, France – Bulgarie Philatelie bulletin was published in Paris. The France – Bulgaria Philatelic Association, which issued it, together with the wider France – Bulgaria Society, were public organisations for bilateral cooperation and were supported by the French Communist Party. The Association held joint French Bulgarian philatelic exhibitions and organised participations in big philatelic events in Paris, Sofia and elsewhere. Artists in Bulgaria perceived the postage stamp as a desirable field of manifestation due to both its greater autonomy as a graphic form and its primary purpose to travel without any restrictions. The most fascinating in artistic terms are the cycles which were the least connected with the Communist Party propaganda. The series that reproduced works of art draw the greatest attention. The France – Bulgarie Philatelie Bulletin, together with the French-Bulgarian philatelic exhibitions in the 1960 and at the turn of the 1970s, is part of the effort to promote and sell Bulgarian postage stamps, and through them “images of Bulgaria” abroad.
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The article is focused on a new wave of interest of theatre artists in Russia in the sites where they live. These practices started in the 2010s, continuing the ideas of the 1960s situationists, who investigated the term ‘psychogeography’ and searched the connection between geography and the soul of the human being. These practices are also influenced by the 1960s environmental projects and site-specific experiments of American artist Richard Schechner who changed the classical theatre model. The experience of performative arts came to Russia in the 2010s when the books and articles of Schechner and others were translated and young theatre artists reopened those investigations again but according to local circumstances. Theatre projects based on the documentary researches of the local environment became very popular and interesting from the 2000s when the documentary theatre came to Russia from Great Britain. Together with theories of performance and political activism (or intervention) it changed the landscape of contemporary theatre a lot and gave us the feeling of reality.
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Under communism, in terms of theatre, repertory issues played a key role in the cultural policy. Bulgarian theatre’s subjection to the communist ideology and to sovietisation was the dominant bias. Repertory was dominated by those policies as well. By the mid-1950s a substitution of the natural repertoire choices was made. After Stalin’s death (1953) and the denunciation of the personality cult, a temporary thaw followed. The changed environment had an impact on the repertory policy and on the tangibility in the repertory decisions. Without any abrupt movements, the authorities redirected repertory choices into new courses. The base requirements as formulated up to the mid-1950s were still valid but after 1953–1956 the boundaries of permissibility in repertory plans gradually broadened as a result of authority decisions, or after having been provoked by phenomena within the Bulgarian theatre’s dramaturgical and stage practices.
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This paper is part of a thesis on the role of personal archive collections in the construction of historical art knowledge (using materials from the archives of Lyubomir Tenev and Alexander Alexandrov). Travelling, researchers deepen their research and at the same time manage to collect material for both their research and archives, while sharing experiences and ideas. Under socialism, travelling abroad was the only way to have access to foreign literature. In this respect, film critic Alexander Alexandrov was favoured because in that period he was able to travel around the world and form a huge collection of books, in his words, 24,000 from 26 countries, as well as 6,000 books on cinema and 8,000 magazines.
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This paper considers the experimental application of the SKAMPER (ZOPIPPP) method in the learning process of students in Engineering Design. The SKAMPER (ZOPIPPP) method belongs to heuristic methods that use textual and verbal techniques to stimulate creative thinking. The method is applied in the laboratory exercises in Innovative and Strategic Design discipline with students from the master’s programme for two consecutive years. The initial conditions, temporal and thematic limitations in conducting the experiment are propounded. Based on the results, an analysis is made of the application of the method in the learning process of students aimed at creating new and improving existing products.
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The purpose of this study is to identify from the multitude of visible signs that nature creates, water as life-generating symbol, in close connection with the anatomy and feminine form. Thus, in “Picturesque and melancholy”, Andrei Pleşu says the following: “Before being visually interesting, nature has been, since early Antiquity, extremely stimulating in allegorical terms. Before it was a landscape, it was, (the nature) therefore, a character; and "always a female character." The earth and the water, the moon and the woman, the night and the shell, for example, are as many symbolic elements as man has managed to identify from the multitude of visible signs that nature creates. At the same time, however, man felt the need to categorize these forms, seeking to group them and thus better understand their meaning and mystery. Different eras and cultures have given rise to various theories related to the feminine form and nature.
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In the early 20th century there was an intensive overlapping of elements of the newly-forming style of popular music called jazz with the individual compositional styles of American and European composers of musical modernism. We can observe the diffusion, in all components of the musical structure, in many works by more or less well-known composers. While some of them were programmatically devoted to a synthesis of jazz and musical modernism in the whole of their output, for others this happened only exceptionally. The study contains analyses and comparison of selected works from the early 20th century, which show features of genre diffusion (Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Erwin Schulhoff, Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martinů, George Gershwin).
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The article presents the state-of-the-art in the studies on Celtic crosses. They date back to the early Middle Ages, before the 12th century, and are preserved in Wales, Cornwall, certain parts of Scotland, but mostly in Ireland.
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The article discusses the educational value of the gardens of the Convent of Bernardine Fathers in Stradom (Krakow).
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On 8 September 1253 bishop Stanisław of Szczepanów was canonised in the basilica of St Francis at Assisi. A year later his relics were elevated to the altar in the centre of the crossing of the so-called second Romanesque cathedral on the ancient Wawel hill at Kraków. This elevation transformed the church, which had functioned for centuries as the seat of the second most important bishop in the country, into the centre of St Stanisław’s cult. In time the cathedral acquired other functions, becoming the Polish coronation church and royal necropolis, a true Kónigskirche, as well as undergoing numerous architectural transformations. All the transformations, especially in the western part of the church, were to a great degree linked with the presence of the saint’s shrine. Yet in the past students of the cathedral focused mainly on the changes in the structural fabric of the building. Only a few scholars have devoted their attention to other issues such as patronage or an ideological programme and, most importantly, to the study of the church as the main sanctuary of St Stanislaw.
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On September 8, 1753 a celebration took place in the Wawel Cathedral to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the canonisation of St. Stanislaus. The main element of a specially prepared decoration was a structure of considerable size as sembled in the middle of the nave, opposite the martyr’s tomb. It served as a throne on top of which a late Gothic reliquary, made by a Cracovian goldsmith Marcin Marciniec, for Stanislaus’ head was placed. The structure was embellished with the Saint’s coats of arms and candelabras and over it a canopy with wings spread to the sides was hung. On both sides of the reliquary two eagles were placed. Two more, holding a mitre and a crosier, stood underneath. In the four comers of the structure four obelisks adorned with candelabras were placed, while the sides of the altar of St. Stanislaus had two more with lights and bishop’s insignia painted on them. Among various forms of relics veneration propagated by the Church after the Council of Trent, one was their solemn presentation to the congregation. The article analyses different examples of decorations connected with such presentations. As a close analogy to Cracow’s celebrations a jubilee of the nine-hundredth anniversary of the translation of St. Liborius from Le Mans to Paderbom celebrated in 1736 was chosen. The analysis includes annual celebrations inhonour of St. Florian at Sackingen and customs connected with the translations of relics from the catacombs in Rome to churches in the Habsburg countries. The examples listed and the analysis of the written sources about Cracow allowed a hypothetical reconstruction of occasional architecture and an interpretation of its symbolic contents.
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For over one hundred years research discussions have revolved around two issues: was Skałka really the site of the martyrdom of bishop Stanislaus, and, what was the church like in its medieval phases: the alleged, pre-Romanesque phase and, confirmedby sources, the Gothic foundation of Casimir the Great. An argument over the site of the martyrdom will turn out to be unimportant if it is considered in two different meanings, two different orders of interpretation. In the historiographic meaning, bishop Stanislaus might have been killed on the Wawel hill, while in the hagiographic meaning, the martyrdom must have taken place on the site called Skałka, outside the town and the Vistula river, in a distant sanctuary of Archangel Gabriel. The latter of the aforementioned research questions - what was the church “NaSkałce’ like in the Middle Ages - was put at the end of the 19th century by Władysław Łuszczkiewicz. In an answer, he presented the churches imagined in the scenes of the Martyrdom of St. Stanislaus in triptychs from St. Mary’s church in Cracow and froma church at Pławno. He understood them as realistic views of Skałka at the beginning of the 16th century A survey of a broad material shows, however, that in the late medieval iconography of St. Stanislaus at least two architectural types of the church which is the background of the Martyrdom scene can be distinguished at the beginning of the 16th century. The question what Skałka was like in reality is a wrong question then and must be left unanswered. The right question is: why was the architectural background of the Martyrdom scene depicted in such different ways, and, was this architecture in its iconographic design really meant to show only the Gothic church ‘Na Skałce’. With varied realisations of details of the church itself, the common motives of all depictions of Skałka are: walls surrounding the hill, gates built in them - one, two or three, always open and flights of stairs or ladders leading to the gates from the site where the hired assassins mutilate the body of the Saint. Moreover, nearly in every depiction figures can be seen mounting the stairs towards the open gates. These figures as well as stairs or ladders or gates are not to be found in the texts of The Life o f the Saint because painted and graphic renderings have primarily moralizing aim. The archetype of ‘the stairs to Heaven’ is substantiated in the iconography of the Martyrdom as stairs to the church on Skałka.The interpretation of the stairs to Skałka can therefore be resented as follows: L i t e r a l l y , stairs to the gates are indeed stairs leading to the church ‘Na Skałce’. I n a n a l l e g o r i c a l interpretation, they are the Cross of Christ, who enabled thefaithful to ascend to Redemption. A typological unity of steps on Jacob’s ladder and the Cross of Christ has frequently been raised in exegesis, and St. Stanislaus appears here, like every martyr, as alter Christus. In a t r o p o l o g i c a l interpretation, ascending stairs indicate aspiring towards perfection through mounting the steps of deeds. I n a n a n a g o g i c interpretation, these stairs lead to the gates of heavenly Jerusalem.
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An ideal of nation and freedom, characteristic of the 19th century, constituted the grounds for the patriotic image of St. Adalbert. In the circumstances of the loss of national independence, the first patron saint of the motherland managed to thrive as a potent symbol of independent Poland. An analysis of selected texts of patriotic and religious propaganda revealed its background. It is the language of myth that transforms the historic person of Wojciech (Adalbert) Slawnikowicz into a model hero, who makes a comeback to the glorious and commendable beginnings in the history of the nation possible in order to restore the religious and independent Poland.
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In the capitulary archives at Wawel a manuscript is kept of the inspection of the Kamieniecka diocese dating from 1777, which was ordered by bishop Adam Krasiński. The manuscript was sent to the capitulary archives at Wawel together with a part of archbishop Fr. Symon’s legacy. The article discusses the inspection manuscript, which was the last inspection in the Kamieniecka diocese in the Old Polish period.
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