The devotional image as a medium of memory

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse Eugeniusz Kazimirowski’s painting of the Divine Mercy as a multifaceted medium of memory. The Image of Divine Mercy was rightly described as the most influential contemporary Polish image (Ivan Gaskell). The first Image of the Divine Mercy was painted in Vilnius in 1934 by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski according to the personal instructions of the Polish mystic Faustina Kowalska (since 2002, a saint of the Catholic Church), whom in 1931, during a vision, Christ ordered to paint his image in accordance with the figure in which then he revealed himself to her. The cult of the image of the Divine Mercy spread after the outbreak of World War II, initially in the Vilnius region, and then in central (Warsaw) and southern (Krakow) Poland. The images created at that time represented the same iconographic type: Jesus was depicted in a walking posture, raising his hand in a gesture of blessing and lifting his robe around the heart, from where the rays of water (white-blue ray) and blood (red ray) emerge. And it is the version painted by Adolf Hyla, currently in Łagiewniki (Krakow) – that has become the world’s most famous image of God’s Mercy. The text analyses these both and other various versions of the image of Divine Mercy as a multifaceted medium of memory: 1) memory of the “revealed image”; 2) historical and contextual memory visualised in the representational sphere of images; and 3) memory recorded in the history of images understood as the history of things.