We are delighted to host virtually the Princeton-Warsaw Symposium on Eastern European Art and Architecture, Proxy and Interstice: Mediating Spaces in Early Modern Central/Eastern Europe, on Thursday 18 March, from 9am to 3 pm, ET.

While current critical reexaminations of colonial legacies within academia have engendered prominent debates on the possibilities of writing ‘global art history’, their impact on scholarship on Eastern European art and architecture still remains limited. In questioning the prominence of the centre-periphery explanatory model, discourses regarding transnationalism, hybrid identities, and cross-cultural encounters remain restricted to specific, predominantly (post)modern, case studies, many of which were inspired by Piotr Piotrowski’s influential call for writing ‘horizontal art history’. Nevertheless, his emphasis on tracing global connectedness finds its counterpart in the region’s centuries-long social and cultural heterogeneity, with some of its most striking manifestations to be found in the heterodox artistic production of the Early Modern period. Far from a mere ‘where East meets West’ commonplace, Central/Eastern Europe constitutes a site of a dynamic negotiation interweaving Oriental and Occidental models, so reflecting and acting upon the contradictory social dynamics underlying the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg empire and their porous borderlands. In this process architecture played a prominent role, both by structuring the sociable tenets of such encounters, and by providing a platform for artistic merging in its very production. Our symposium aims to reappraise these insufficiently appreciated interpretative potentialities by exploring Eastern European architecture as a space of mediation, both on the levels of representation and social practice. In revisiting the questions of orientalism, patronage, and temporality, this approach will help explore architecture’s power to serve as both proxy and interstice: to simultaneously bridge and establish boundaries across cultures, periods and beyond.

Organizers: Dr hab. Barbara Arciszewska (University of Warsaw) & Aleksnader Musiał (Princeton University)

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME (all times in CET):

14:00-14:10 Dr hab. Barbara Arciszewska (University of Warsaw)
Welcome Remarks

14:10-14:55 Prof. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton University)
Opening lecture: The Imperial Theme in Architecture and Art of the Polish Vasas

Session One: Networks of Patronage

15:00-15:15 Johanna Suzanna Hermán (Princeton University)
The Patronage of Cardinal Tamás Bakócz de Erdevd (1442-1521): Between Corvinian Aegis, Jagiellonian Rule, and Papal Auspices

15:15-15:30 Łukasz Traczyk (University of Warsaw)
Professional background of Warsaw architects in the mid-17th century

15:30-15:45 Esther Griffin (University of Warsaw Palamusto grant)
Marie Casimire Sobieska (1641-1716): networks of architectural patronage and collecting

15:45-15:55 Discussion
Respondent: Felix Schmieder (University of Warsaw Palamusto grant)

Session Two: Spaces of Confluence

16:00-16:15 Dr Anna Oleńska (Polish Academy of Sciences)
In the shadow of someone else? Women as co-patrons in arts in the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

16:15-16:30 Prof. Carolyn Guile (Colgate University, NY)
TBC

16:30-16:45 Dr Izabela Kopania (Polish Academy of Sciences)
‘A Living Image of Antiquity.’ Locating Chinese Art
in Polish Culture at the Turn of the 19th Century

16:45-16:55 Discussion
Respondent: Prof. Jakub Sito (Polish Academy of Sciences)

Related event
17:00-18:15 Dr Rosalind Blakesley (University of Cambridge)
Power and Paint: Patronage of Women Artists at the Court of Catherine II
Event co-organized by Princeton Institute for International Regional Studies, and Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Session three: Proximity of Distance
18:30-18:45 Albert Kozik (University of Warsaw)
Half Turkish, Half Chinese: Stanislas Leszczyński’s ‘Chinese’ Pavilion in Lunéville and the Cross-Cultural Dynamics of the Polish-Ottoman Border

18:45-19:00 Luciano Vanni (Princeton University)
Hercules against Cacus and Busiris: The Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty, the loss of Silesia, and the new sculptural decoration of Prague Castle.

19:00-19:15 Magdalena Królikiewicz (Royal Castle in Warsaw)
Turquerie and life at the Saxon court. About four genre paintings by Johann Samuel Mock.

19:15-19:30 Yifu Liu (Princeton University)
Multiplicity of Chinoiserie: Drawings of Chinese Architecture in the Collection of Izabela Lubomirska in the Łańcut Castle

19:30-19:45 Discussion
Respondent: Claire Sabitt (Princeton University)

19:45-20:00 Aleksander Musiał (Princeton University)
Closing remarks

Register here: http://bit.ly/031821WebinarMusial
Paper abstracts can be found following this link: http://bit.ly/3qIrI4T