Byzantine and Gothic Side-by-side: Stylistic Diversity under a Single Roof in the Churches of Late-medieval Transylvania

Abstract

This essay analyzes the cases of coexistence within the same church of mural decoration displaying both (Post-)Byzantine and Gothic styles, which occurred during the 14th and 15th centuries on the territory of the Voivodate of Transylvania and the south-eastern border counties of the Kingdom of Hungary. This phenomenon of stylistic diversity under the same roof occurred at different stages during the larger and cumulative projects of church decoration, and the reasons for such occurrences varied. Orthodox patrons proved to be more conservative and very attached to their own cultural, religious, and visual traditions, and subsequently commissioned Western painters with the decoration of their churches only when the artists belonging to their own cultural and religious traditions were unavailable (e.g., Hălmagiu and Strei). In contrast with the Orthodox, Catholic patrons had a flexible artistic taste and were more prone to embrace the alternative aesthetic solutions proposed to them by traveling artists with Byzantine training (e.g., Buneşti, Dârlos, Sântămăria-Orlea, Şmig, Valea Lungă, and probably Deva and Târgu Mureş). A special situation of stylistic diversity under a single roof is represented by those cases, which occurred when Romanian Orthodox patrons—despite their belonging to a different confession—exercised their legal right of patronage over those Catholic churches found on their estates (e.g., Sântămăria-Orlea and Remetea). The Orthodox patrons’ strong attachment to their own religious and visual traditions led to the coexistence within the same Catholic church not only of murals displaying Gothic and (Post-)Byzantine formal features, but also of inscriptions in the liturgical languages of the two Churches (i.e., Latin and Church Slavonic). Since this essay approached the phenomenon of aesthetic diversity strictly from a stylistic or formal point of view, its devotional implications will be analyzed on a different occasion, when it will be contextualized together with other transcultural phenomena, such as those of linguistic diversity under the same roof, cross-credal artistic patronage, and shared devotion of Catholic saints by the Eastern-rite Christians. The results of the project Models of Representation of the Past in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2019 are presented in this work.