The 10 most-cited articles in Artium Quaestiones, 2018

In January 1906, in the turbulent period of 1905–1907, the poet, artist, and socialactivist Antoni Lange published in the Warsaw weekly Świat an essay called“Marzenia warszawskie” (“The Warsaw Dreams”). A several page text, illustratedwith woodcuts by the painter Andrzej Zarzycki, included a spectacular vision of metropolitanWarsaw of the future: a capital city with many public buildings and moderninfrastructure, a genuine center of Polish national and cultural life. The present essayanalyzes unexamined ideas of Lange in terms of the history of architecture, andin a double political and social context. “The Warsaw Dreams” was deeply rooted inthe political reality of the former Kingdom of Poland, addressing the issue of liberalizationof the Russian rule during the 1905 revolution. Using the vocabulary of urbanplanning and making a list of changes in the city’s architecture, Lange articulateda vision of the future space of Warsaw as a Polish metropolis of modernity, administeredindependently of Russia. In his essays he proposed to extend the city limits andremove its fortifications as…

The essay offers a philosophical interpretation of the concept of the garden accordingto the contemporary Italian aesthetician Rosario Assunto (1915–1994). Assuntosystematically developed a philosophical theory focused on the question of theidentity of the garden. He was interested in the “idea of the Garden” which, in hisopinion, determined historical gardens both at the ontological and epistemologicallevel. He defined the garden in terms of a happy connection of man and nature, basedon the aesthetic contemplation of beauty, characteristic of all the gardens regardlessof historical differences among them. According to Assunto, gardens are places whichcombine together aesthetics, ethics, and logic. This combination determines theunique identity of the garden which takes various forms, depending on the individualpoetics of their makers, socio-historical realities, taste, and the correspondent ideas ofnature. Assunto’s starting points are thus historical versions of the garden, descriptiveliterature, and German philosophy of the turn of the 19th century. For the Italianphilosopher,…

Pałając pragnieniem. Narodziny fotografii

The essay, focusing on architecture in the nineteenth-century partitioned Poland, is an attempt to read its meanings in the context of the colonial policies of Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The analyzed material includes selected buildings and city centers of Poznań, Warsaw, and Cracow, while the problems addressed are the encoding of urban space meanings and its deciphering in the context of complex nineteenth-century Polish history.

The essay is a response to a biographical dominant of the critical discourse on the works of Alina Szapocznikow. It seems to miss an aspect of her sculpture which isthe most important from the point of view of art history – that of the impact of thespecific works on the spectator. Such an objective of art history has been formulated by Michael Brötje, the founder of the existential-hermeneutic study of art. That radical theory, based on the dismissal of the discourses which are external to the artistic object, instead turning the critic’s attention to the medium as the meaningful foundation of the work, is adequate to a perspective adopted in the present essay. It has been modified to fit sculpture since Brötje himself applied it mainly to painting. The essay includes analyses of her three works: “Stopy (Fetysz V),” “Maria Magdalena,” and “Dwuczęściowa.” In each case, the existential-hermeneutic method has been applied; focusing mainly on the impact of the medium, as well as the term “creation-analogy” has been used, also originally introduced by Brötje. That term makes it possible…

Polish and German Art History in a Polemic. The Rogalin Symposium of 1973 Summary The paper recapitulates a discussion over the book, Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, ed. Martin Warnke, Köln 1970, which was an aftermath of a pungent statement made by critical German art historians at the Congress of German Art Historians held in Köln in 1970. The main idea of the book was showing the “work of art as an object of ideological interests, a victim of ideological interventions” (Warnke) – in this case, those of a nationalist, Nazi, and fascist origin. A critical impulse triggered by the congress and the book was the main reason for organizing a symposium in Rogalin in 1973, during which art historians from Poznań delivered papers-comments on four articles included in the German publication. Taking into consideration the key message of the book, in the first place they focused on the methodological and theoretical assumptions adopted by German scholars. Stressing the discrepancy between the goals and assumptions of the German publication and its Polish reception,…

Artists’ studios turned into museums are always specific representations of thepast – spatial images reflecting some idea of art and the artist, as well as his or herworks, and even the position of the spectator imagined as a visitor, admirer, insider,outsider or pilgrim.When a studio is shown through a film, its status of representation comes to theforeground very distinctly just because of the properties of the medium. A filmic representationof the studio is a result of combining images into a sequence, while individualimages attract the spectator’s attention to particular places, areas or aspectsof the space of creation, thus making him or her follow a certain trajectory of meaning.What is more, such a sequence does not have to be limited to the studio’s interiorsince the cinematic montage allows the director to expand it freely by adding somehistoricizing or contextualizing frames. Finally, film allows one to meet the artist inhis or her space through an interview, representation of the creative process or anactor-impersonator.In the first I discuss briefly three issues: the…

Dorobek badawczy Piotra Piotrowskiego jest znany na świecie.On sam był aktywnym członkiem międzynarodowego środowiska naukowego.Przez całe życie, jednak, pozostał silnie związany z Instytutem Historii Sztuki na Uniwersytecie im.Adama Mickiewicza i z Poznaniem.W Instytucie Historii Sztuki UAM studiował w latach 1971-1976 i pracował od 1980 1 .Edukacja w poznańskiej jednostce w dużym stopniu ukształtowała jego postawę badawczą i podejście do sztuki.W wywiadach i prywatnych rozmowach wskazywał na dwie osoby, starszych kolegów, którzy w tamtym czasie odegrali kluczową rolę -Andrzeja Turowskiego i Jarosława Kozłowskiego.

In the southern porch of the Poznań cathedral there is a swinging door etched inbronze and brass, made in 1972. Together with a bronze bas-relief placed above, itwas the most important element of the decoration of the passage from the residenceof Poznań archbishops to the cathedral. Both artworks were made by Ireneusz Daczkoand Bogdan Fijałkowski – graduates of the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts. Theirproject was inspired by Rev. Stefan Tomaszkiewicz, who supervised constructionwork in the cathedral, and Rev. Bolesław Dzierwa, involved in the restoration of thecathedral in Gniezno. Both priests developed an original iconographic program of the porch decoration, based upon angelistic, christological, and mariological symbolismand texts in Polish, Latin, and Greek.The figures of archangels Gabriel and Michael in the door panels have a borderwith inscriptions, monograms, angels, and zoomorphic motifs, and objects intertwinedwith climbing plants. The decoration of the door and the bas relief showingthe Assumption of Mary includes many references to the liturgy of the breviary,and points to…

The bronze statue of Neptune (around 1615–20) in the Long Market (DługiTarg) in Gdańsk unifies two opposed antique prototypes, a contrapposto figure which shows the god Neptune peacefully resting, and a dynamic figureapplying the trident, his weapon, in combat. The new combination representsmimetically the changeable nature of the god’ s liquid sphere, the sea.In its artistic invention the statue manifests such an exact knowledge andfamiliarity with the study of antiquity and the artistic methods from MichelangeloBuonarroti until to Giambologna (Jean Boulogne, 1529– 1608), thatwe have to look for the artist among those trained in sixteenth Century Florence.Among the works of the Dutch Hubert Gerhard (1550– 1620), traineduntil to 1581 in Florence in the circle of Giambologna and later active inAugsburg and Munich as a leading Northern Mannerist artist, the ArchangelVanquishing Lucifer (1588) at the facade of St Michael’s Church (M unich)comes most close to the movement expressed in the Gdańsk Ne ptune.