Work in Progress

  Case study: The iconographic cycle in the church of Mălâncrav .      This essay aims to highlight the presence of the holy Arpadian kings in the churches of the nobility in Transylvania and the Kingdom of medieval Hungary, trying to elucidate the way in which the nobility perceives the dynastic sanctity, more precisely, whether the rendering of the three saints in churches represents a social aspiration or a cult.    The cult of the three Hungarian holy kings is initially diffused in the kingdom with the support of the Arpadian dynasty. Stephen I, the first Christian king of the Kingdom of medieval Hungary, ruled between 1000 / 1001-1038 and was one of the main promoters of Christianity. In his lifetime, based on the principle of primogeniture, he named his son Emeric (Imre) as heir to the royal throne, but died in 1031 without being crowned. In 1083 both Stephen I and his son Emeric are canonized at the initiative of King Ladislas I (1077-1095), [1] a...

        Britannia Pacificatrix is a painting by Sigismund Goetze, made in 1921 for the Foreign Office of the British Government. It belongs to a larger series of works made by Goetze starting from 1912, all of them centered on the evolution, expansion, and triumph of the British Empire. Decorating the walls of the entire office, the images form a propagandistic story that wants to express, through allegorical methods, the grandeur, the power, and the superiority of the Empire that pacified the world after World War I.     A short morphological analysis of the work can easily reflect its propagandistic character: the center of the painting is occupied by the magnificent Britain, dressed in a red cloak that resembles the imperialist troops’ uniforms and a galea, a roman helmet that makes her look like the goddess Athena. On the left side there are the allegorical representations of Britain’s dominions: firstly, the colonies of white people (Australia, Canada...