Paper -a:
The analysis of several Polish goldsmiths' works of art from the late 15th Century presents various functions of the symbols of wealth and poverty and their various perception. The cycles dedicated to Polish patrons and saints (e.g. St. Adalbert, St. Stanislaus) shows the poor either as the saints' 'passive attributes' or as the indications of their virtues. On the other hand, in the very same works of art, the symbols of wealth are depicted in much more ambiguous way: e.g. they can indicate completely opposite moral attitudes.
Paper -b:
The paper will discuss the options for and functions of church decorations (sculptures, murals, movables) in the newly colonised and Christianised areas in the Eastern Baltic in the 13th century. It will also look at the influence of the discovery and conservation-restoration process of these decorations on their perception in modern scholarship. The case studies from medieval Livonia are analysed in a wider Northern European context.
Paper -c:
The so-called construction worker paintings constitute a relatively distinctive group among the Nordic late-medieval ecclesiastical wall paintings. Their defining formal features have generally been considered as simple or 'primitive' and their subject matter enigmatic. Problems concerning the identification and interpretation of this heterogeneous group of paintings have led to assumptions that formal and visual exiguity of images may equally manifest the spiritual and conceptual poverty of their subject-matter. My paper examines this notion of 'visual poverty' as an evaluative historiographical construction created in order to understand the visual idiom of the church builders, and its validity in assessing and reassessing diverse visual practices.
| 