Dalina Bădescu

Neo-Byzantinism, National Identity and the National Cathedral: Monumental Religious Art in Modern and Contemporary Romania

This three-part article examines the encounter between Byzantine visual tradition and modern art in Romania, from the nineteenth century to the mosaics of the National Cathedral in Bucharest. Part I argues that interwar Romania was almost the only Orthodox country to convert the...

The Architecture of Absence: Memorial Architecture in Romania from the Archaic Cross to the Mărășești Mausoleum and Brâncuși's Way of the Heroes

This article examines the origins and the interwar consolidation of memorial architecture in Romania and argues that the Romanian memorial has never lost a latent sacred function inherited from Orthodox ritual. It first distinguishes the monument from the memorial, the former des...

Representations of the Sacred in Romanian Visual Art: The Garden, Utopia, the Temple, and the City

This study reads sacred architecture as an open process rather than a finished object, one that begins with the divine prototypes revealed in the Bible (the Garden of Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, Jerusalem, and the New Jerusalem) and continues in every encounter between a bu...

Man and the Center of the World: A Short History of the Map

The maps we use today, in navigation apps and on tourist plans of the cities we visit, appear at first sight to be purely utilitarian instruments. This essay argues that the map has never been a neutral representation of the world. From its first appearance it has been a cultural...

Man and the Center of the World: A Short History of the Map

The maps we use today, in navigation apps and on tourist plans of the cities we visit, appear at first sight to be purely utilitarian instruments. This essay argues that the map has never been a neutral representation of the world. From its first appearance it has been a cultural...

Memorials of Abuse: The Holocaust, Communism, and Memorial Ritual in Romania

This article examines the memorial architecture of abuse in Romania, from the Memorial of the Victims of the Holocaust in Bucharest (2009) to the memorials built after 1989 for the victims of communism, and reads them against the commemorative practices that give them meaning. Th...

Neo-Byzantinism, National Identity and the National Cathedral: Monumental Religious Art in Modern and Contemporary Romania

This three-part article examines the encounter between Byzantine visual tradition and modern art in Romania, from the nineteenth century to the mosaics of the National Cathedral in Bucharest. Part I argues that interwar Romania was almost the only Orthodox country to convert the...

Man and the Center of the World: A Short History of the Map

The maps we use today, in navigation apps and on tourist plans of the cities we visit, appear at first sight to be purely utilitarian instruments. This essay argues that the map has never been a neutral representation of the world. From its first appearance it has been a cultural...

Neo-Byzantinism, National Identity and the National Cathedral: Monumental Religious Art in Modern and Contemporary Romania

This three-part article examines the encounter between Byzantine visual tradition and modern art in Romania, from the nineteenth century to the mosaics of the National Cathedral in Bucharest. Part I argues that interwar Romania was almost the only Orthodox country to convert the...

Representations of the Sacred in Romanian Visual Art: The Garden, Utopia, the Temple, and the City

This study reads sacred architecture as an open process rather than a finished object, one that begins with the divine prototypes revealed in the Bible (the Garden of Eden, the Tabernacle, the Temple, Jerusalem, and the New Jerusalem) and continues in every encounter between a bu...

The Two Jerusalems: Sacred Space, Utopia and the Contemporary Image

This article brings together three texts that follow a single question from the biblical city to the present: how a community projects an ideal order onto the space it inhabits, and what happens to that projection once its transcendent axis is removed. The first part reads the ea...

The Architecture of Absence: Memorial Architecture in Romania from the Archaic Cross to the Mărășești Mausoleum and Brâncuși's Way of the Heroes

This article examines the origins and the interwar consolidation of memorial architecture in Romania and argues that the Romanian memorial has never lost a latent sacred function inherited from Orthodox ritual. It first distinguishes the monument from the memorial, the former des...