W duchu concordia discors, czyli o niezmiennej zmienności pór roku. Garść uwag na kanwie nowożytnych sztuk pięknych

Krystyna MOISAN-JABŁOŃSKA

Katedra Ikonografii Sztuki Nowożytnej, Instytut Historii Sztuki, Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego, ul. Wóycickiego 1/3, bud. 23, 01-938 Warszawa, Poland , Polska

Abstrakt

The four seasons, which determine the cycle of time in the sublunary world, have become one of the most popular subjects of painting in modern times. Its numerous manifestations, rich in meaning, have resulted in the creation of a diverse iconography, in particular paintings and wall decorations, many of which exhibit an individual and complex symbolism. The canon of the personifications of spring, summer, autumn and winter was being shaped for centuries and ultimately defined by the Italian erudite Cesare Ripa in 1593. While figures of the personifications described and pictured in his Iconology dominated 17th and 18th century art, the invention of artists who followed the spirit of the Baroque profusion resulted in constant metamorphoses
of the symbols thus developed and of the meanings attributed to them. In consequence, the seasons provided the dominant motifs with which castles and palaces were decorated, as was in the case of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s well known cycle, the artist’s gift to Emperor Maximillian II of the Holy Roman Empire, on the threshold of the new year 1569, in which the effort to show the apotheosis of the ruler was combined with the idea of depicting the ideal union of the micro- and macrocosm. In Polish art, a particular example of this trend can be seen in the plafonds in King John III Sobieski’s Wilanów Palace, located in the area of Warsaw. The ceiling paintings in question are work of Jerzy Eleuter Szymonowicz-Siemiginowski, who studied in St. Luke Academy in Rome. The program of these paintings, which above all stress the political significance of the rule of the Polish king whose army defeated the Turks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, has also got a strictly personal aspect: the depiction of Autumn in Queen Maria Kazimiera d’Arquien’s anticamera includes hidden symbols referring to the passion between the royal couple (which, by the way, was a rare occurrence in the case of a royal marriage). Mannerist and Baroque paintings frequently expressed a philosophical message about human life. The tenor of numerous works embraces two opposite poles: the Horatian idea of carpe diem and that of the everpresent vanitas. The four seasons, while traditionally associated with lay themes, escape superficial definitions which radically divide the arts into the sacred and the profane. Already the Church Fathers, but also medieval theologians, developed a complex symbolic interpratation of the seasons. In the modern period, their symbolism was a particular inspiraton for Nicolas Poussin, who between 1660 and 1664 created a set of paintings entitled The Four Seasons. They depicted various landscapes which were the setting of particular events from the Old Testament (Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Ruth Gleaning Corn in the Fields of Boaz; Israelite Spies Returning from the Promised Land of Canaan, and The Flood). The landscapes thus presented exhibit multilayered meanings, allowing various and not infrequently contradictory  interpretations. In Poland, the seasons were painted by Walenty Żebrowski, between 1762 and 1764, on the vault of the Bernardine Fathers’ Church in Ostrołęka. The personifications of the particular seasons were provided with subtitles including extracts from the Latin Bible praising the Divine Providence. The Creator is thus described as the One who “warmed up the spring,” “prepared food in summer,” “harvested in the autumn” and “commanded winter.” The present article can by no means exhaust all the aspects of the modern symbolism of the seasons. The examples which have been discussed can merely indicate the extremely rich «poliphony» of meanings attributed in the past centuries to Ver, Aestas, Autumnus and Hiems.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska

Słowa kluczowe:

the seasons, allegories, iconography, modern art, time, vanitas, carpe diem, Divine Providence