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

Abstract

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 Byzantine idiom into an official, secular monumental style for war memorials, as in Eduard Săulescu's frescoes at Mărășești and the theoretical program of Olga Greceanu. A comparative survey of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia shows that these countries kept Byzantine forms within the liturgical sphere, or, in the Soviet case, expelled them from public art altogether, while their public memorials followed neoclassical or realist Western models. Part II reads the iconographic program of the National Cathedral (Catedrala Mântuirii Neamului) along its vertical, horizontal and symbolic axes, discusses its double dedication, the inclusion of the confessors of the communist prisons among the national saints, the technique of gold-ground mosaic, the iconostasis, and the stylistic choices of Daniel Codrescu. Part III traces how easel painting, academic realism and Synod resistance in the late nineteenth century prepared the ground for Romanian neo-Byzantinism, and how modern painters such as Pallady drew on Byzantine flatness, contour and stylization to work simultaneously in tradition and in modernity. Working paper (preprint). English version of a text first written in Romanian by the author; translated and edited for this deposit, with corrected references. Not yet peer reviewed. Comments and citations welcome; a journal version may follow.