Grabarz, mogiła, szkielet i geometria

Abstract

Taking as a pretext The Church Interior, a painting kept at the Museum Orsettich House in Jarosław, the text discusses the links between 17th–century Dutch painting and 20th–century modernism. Considering a potential connection between the small painting (32.5 × 23.5 cm) dated to the 17th century, purchased in an antique shop in Przemyśl in 1979, and paintings by Hendrick Corneliszoon van Vliet, I point out the presence of three elements characteristic of this painter, not always present in the paintings of other perspective painters, for example in the most famous of them, Pieter Saenredam’s. In Vliet’s church interiors epitaphs, the clergy and the faithful are accompanied by gravediggers, earth mounds and sometimes also skeletons. The author also invokes other paintings by the landscapist and portraitist active in Delft between 1635 and 1672, known mainly for his scenes of burying the dead, shown in the interiors of Nieuwe Kerk or Oude Kerk in Delft, stored at Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Paris Louvre or the National Museum in Warsaw. Indicating the mystical and hermeneutical ambitions of Malevich’s suprematism or Mondrian’s neoplasticism, as well as the pragmatism of modern society reflected in the ideas of Bauhaus and constructivism, the author discusses rationalism and iconoclasticism behind the aesthetics of the Protestant church.