Books by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Brill, 'The Northern World' series, 2015
In Visual Cultures of Death in Central Europe, Aleksandra Koutny-Jones explores the emergence of ... more In Visual Cultures of Death in Central Europe, Aleksandra Koutny-Jones explores the emergence of a remarkable cultural preoccupation with death in Poland-Lithuania (1569-1795). Examining why such interests resonated so strongly in the Baroque art of this Commonwealth, she argues that the printing revolution, the impact of the Counter-Reformation, and multiple afflictions suffered by Poland-Lithuania all contributed to a deep cultural concern with mortality.
Introducing readers to a range of art, architecture and material culture, this study considers various visual evocations of death including 'Dance of Death' imagery, funerary decorations, coffin portraiture, tomb chapels and religious landscapes. These, Koutny-Jones argues, engaged with wider European cultures of contemplation and commemoration, while also being critically adapted to the specific context of Poland-Lithuania.
Reviews
"..her book is the first comprehensive overview of many of the varied aspects of what [the author] calls 'visual cultures of death'. [...] Koutny-Jones [...] points to unique or unfamiliar iconographical features of monuments or images that previously have been unduly ignored or neglected. [...] Her well informed study takes up the argument for considering alternatives to earlier models of cultural innovation and diffusion."
Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University, in Print Quarterly, XXXIV, 2017, 1
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Central European Age of Contemplation and Commemoration
CHAPTER 1: Frameworks for Visual Cultures of Death in Poland-Lithuania
- Artistic Patronage in Poland-Lithuania
- The Commonwealth and the Counter-Reformation
- The Central European Printing Revolution
- Plague and Warfare
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: Death Personified: The Skeleton and the Printed Image
- Anatomical Treatises and the Melancholy Death
- The Triumph of Death
- Allegories of Death: The Wheel of Death
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: The Dance of Death in Central Europe: Indigenous Variations on a Familiar Theme
- Dancing with Death in Medieval Western Europe and beyond
- Performing the Dance of Death in Medieval Poland: Master Polikarpus’s Dialogue with Death
- Death and the Friars: The Role of the Observant Franciscans
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: Triumphant Funerals: Ceremonial, Coffin Portraits and Catafalques
- Processional Pomp: Heraldic Displays and the Theatre of Death
- Church Decorations and the 'Castrum Doloris'
- Coffin Portraits: Images of the Spiritual body
- Commemoration in Context: The Burials of the Opaliński Magnate Family
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 5: Architectures and Landscapes of Death: Funerary Chapels and Jerusalem Sites
- The Introduction of the Domed Chapel to Poland and Lithuania: Genesis and Symbolism
- Central European Landscapes of Death: Jerusalem Sites
- Decorating the Seventeenth-century Funerary Chapel: Sculpting the Passion and Personalising the Dance of Death
- Conclusion
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX: The Kraków Taniec śmierci (Dance of Death): Transcription and Translation of Textual Cartouches
Online articles by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Connected Central European Worlds, 1500-1700, 2022
The Last Judgement icon at the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion draws upon a long tradition... more The Last Judgement icon at the Lviv Museum of the History of Religion draws upon a long tradition of religious iconography in Eastern-rite churches within Ukrainian territories. The Carpathian region, in particular, witnessed a flourishing of Last Judgement iconography from the fifteenth century onwards. Examples of this rich early modern tradition survive in what is now eastern Slovakia, southeastern Poland and the western oblasts of Ukraine, especially Lviv and Transcarpathia. The distinctive and large icons produced there – often a couple of metres high – are replete with biblical details as well as references to contemporary life in southwestern Rus’. https://research.kent.ac.uk/emcentraleu/last-judgement-icon-lviv/
Articles by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe: Fourteenth-Nineteenth Centuries, 2023
The visual cultures of Hungarian and Polish elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ha... more The visual cultures of Hungarian and Polish elites in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have often been seen as being closely linked. There were dynastic links between Poland's monarchs and the Hungarian nobility. This chapter investigates the synergies between the Baroque funerary traditions in Hungary and Poland, paying particular attention to painted and performed representations of the deceased. The chapter considers three types of representation: recumbent life-sized paintings of the deceased; funerary bust portraits of the deceased; and performative representations of the deceased. The first of these, painted, recumbent depictions of the deceased, survive from both Hungary and Poland. The second type of representation, coffin bust portraits, is particularly associated with Poland, although this distinct tradition within European funerary practice is understood to derive, in part, from artistic precedents established at the funeral of the Hungarian-born Polish king Stephen Báthory. Lastly, performative representations of the deceased, often on horseback, constituted a dramatic element of many elite Hungarian and Polish funerals. The analysis of funerary art used in Hungarian and Polish commemorative practices highlights the links between these territories and the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.
Mark Stocker and Phillip Lindley eds., Tributes to Jean Michel Massing: Towards a Global Art History, Turnhout (Harvey Miller Publishers), 2016
‘Preaching the Dance of Death’, explores the iconography and patronage of Poland-Lithuania’s last... more ‘Preaching the Dance of Death’, explores the iconography and patronage of Poland-Lithuania’s last, and least studied, decorative cycle of this pan-European macabre theme, located in a cemetery chapel in the Polish town of Zambrów. I examine the social, religious and political backdrop to the creation of the Zambrów wall paintings, which were executed in 1795, the year of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s final partition. I argue that the Zambrów Dance of Death, which was painted by local artists in the folk art tradition, constitutes a conscious revival and reinterpretation of an established motif at a time of particular relevance on the eve of the Commonwealth’s dismemberment. In particular, I focus upon the role of the cemetery chapel’s learned patron, the ambitious Catholic priest and writer Marcin Krajewski, in resurrecting the emotive Dance of Death motif for the purposes of proselytisation as well as commemoration.
Eton Collections Review, 2010
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2009
R. Unger ed., 'Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795', Leiden (Brill), 2008
'Aleksandra Koutny-Jones rightly argues for a more nuanced understanding of Said’s Europe, not as... more 'Aleksandra Koutny-Jones rightly argues for a more nuanced understanding of Said’s Europe, not as a monolithic body to which the Orient, as a whole, is opposed, but as a multipartite body with differing polities, each of which had differing experiences of the East and different manners of assimilating and understanding it' (Adam Jasienski, 'A Savage Magnificence: Ottomanizing fashion and the politics of display in early modern East-Central Europe,' Muqarnas, vol. 31, 2014, p. 183).
'[...] an excellent essay by Koutny-Jones [...] distinguish[es] a subtler form of relations between Poland and Britain and 'the Orient' than Edward Said might have allowed for' (David Worthington in a review of 'Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795' in 'The Scottish Historical Review', Vol. 89, No. 227, Part 1 (April 2010), p. 115).
Book Reviews by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
The BARS Review (Issue No 60), 2024
This volume introduces the reader to the diverse scope of Lord Byron's self-fashioning and posthu... more This volume introduces the reader to the diverse scope of Lord Byron's self-fashioning and posthumous reinterpretation through portraiture. By focusing on a broad range of depictions of George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824) produced during and after his lifetime, the authors shed light upon how this Romantic poet was, and wanted to be, perceived.
The Burlington Magazine, 2022
Print Quarterly, 2019
Review of Grażyna Jurkowlaniec's monograph about Poznań-born Tomasz Treter's printmaking in Rome ... more Review of Grażyna Jurkowlaniec's monograph about Poznań-born Tomasz Treter's printmaking in Rome and its impact in Europe. Includes whole-page reproductions of a painted Allegory of the Roman Catholic Church at Skolity parish church in Warmia, dated 1557, and an engraving entitled 'Typus Ecclesiae Catholicae' after Tomasz Treter, dated 1595.
Religion and the Arts, 2012
Review of Heard, Kate, and Lucy Whitaker. The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein. Chicago and... more Review of Heard, Kate, and Lucy Whitaker. The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein. Chicago and London: Distributed by University of Chicago Press for Royal Collections Publications, 2011.
Reviews of my work by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung
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Books by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Introducing readers to a range of art, architecture and material culture, this study considers various visual evocations of death including 'Dance of Death' imagery, funerary decorations, coffin portraiture, tomb chapels and religious landscapes. These, Koutny-Jones argues, engaged with wider European cultures of contemplation and commemoration, while also being critically adapted to the specific context of Poland-Lithuania.
Reviews
"..her book is the first comprehensive overview of many of the varied aspects of what [the author] calls 'visual cultures of death'. [...] Koutny-Jones [...] points to unique or unfamiliar iconographical features of monuments or images that previously have been unduly ignored or neglected. [...] Her well informed study takes up the argument for considering alternatives to earlier models of cultural innovation and diffusion."
Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University, in Print Quarterly, XXXIV, 2017, 1
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Central European Age of Contemplation and Commemoration
CHAPTER 1: Frameworks for Visual Cultures of Death in Poland-Lithuania
- Artistic Patronage in Poland-Lithuania
- The Commonwealth and the Counter-Reformation
- The Central European Printing Revolution
- Plague and Warfare
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: Death Personified: The Skeleton and the Printed Image
- Anatomical Treatises and the Melancholy Death
- The Triumph of Death
- Allegories of Death: The Wheel of Death
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: The Dance of Death in Central Europe: Indigenous Variations on a Familiar Theme
- Dancing with Death in Medieval Western Europe and beyond
- Performing the Dance of Death in Medieval Poland: Master Polikarpus’s Dialogue with Death
- Death and the Friars: The Role of the Observant Franciscans
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: Triumphant Funerals: Ceremonial, Coffin Portraits and Catafalques
- Processional Pomp: Heraldic Displays and the Theatre of Death
- Church Decorations and the 'Castrum Doloris'
- Coffin Portraits: Images of the Spiritual body
- Commemoration in Context: The Burials of the Opaliński Magnate Family
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 5: Architectures and Landscapes of Death: Funerary Chapels and Jerusalem Sites
- The Introduction of the Domed Chapel to Poland and Lithuania: Genesis and Symbolism
- Central European Landscapes of Death: Jerusalem Sites
- Decorating the Seventeenth-century Funerary Chapel: Sculpting the Passion and Personalising the Dance of Death
- Conclusion
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX: The Kraków Taniec śmierci (Dance of Death): Transcription and Translation of Textual Cartouches
Online articles by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Articles by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
'[...] an excellent essay by Koutny-Jones [...] distinguish[es] a subtler form of relations between Poland and Britain and 'the Orient' than Edward Said might have allowed for' (David Worthington in a review of 'Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795' in 'The Scottish Historical Review', Vol. 89, No. 227, Part 1 (April 2010), p. 115).
Book Reviews by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Reviews of my work by Aleksandra Koutny-Jones
Introducing readers to a range of art, architecture and material culture, this study considers various visual evocations of death including 'Dance of Death' imagery, funerary decorations, coffin portraiture, tomb chapels and religious landscapes. These, Koutny-Jones argues, engaged with wider European cultures of contemplation and commemoration, while also being critically adapted to the specific context of Poland-Lithuania.
Reviews
"..her book is the first comprehensive overview of many of the varied aspects of what [the author] calls 'visual cultures of death'. [...] Koutny-Jones [...] points to unique or unfamiliar iconographical features of monuments or images that previously have been unduly ignored or neglected. [...] Her well informed study takes up the argument for considering alternatives to earlier models of cultural innovation and diffusion."
Professor Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University, in Print Quarterly, XXXIV, 2017, 1
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Central European Age of Contemplation and Commemoration
CHAPTER 1: Frameworks for Visual Cultures of Death in Poland-Lithuania
- Artistic Patronage in Poland-Lithuania
- The Commonwealth and the Counter-Reformation
- The Central European Printing Revolution
- Plague and Warfare
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: Death Personified: The Skeleton and the Printed Image
- Anatomical Treatises and the Melancholy Death
- The Triumph of Death
- Allegories of Death: The Wheel of Death
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: The Dance of Death in Central Europe: Indigenous Variations on a Familiar Theme
- Dancing with Death in Medieval Western Europe and beyond
- Performing the Dance of Death in Medieval Poland: Master Polikarpus’s Dialogue with Death
- Death and the Friars: The Role of the Observant Franciscans
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: Triumphant Funerals: Ceremonial, Coffin Portraits and Catafalques
- Processional Pomp: Heraldic Displays and the Theatre of Death
- Church Decorations and the 'Castrum Doloris'
- Coffin Portraits: Images of the Spiritual body
- Commemoration in Context: The Burials of the Opaliński Magnate Family
- Conclusion
CHAPTER 5: Architectures and Landscapes of Death: Funerary Chapels and Jerusalem Sites
- The Introduction of the Domed Chapel to Poland and Lithuania: Genesis and Symbolism
- Central European Landscapes of Death: Jerusalem Sites
- Decorating the Seventeenth-century Funerary Chapel: Sculpting the Passion and Personalising the Dance of Death
- Conclusion
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX: The Kraków Taniec śmierci (Dance of Death): Transcription and Translation of Textual Cartouches
'[...] an excellent essay by Koutny-Jones [...] distinguish[es] a subtler form of relations between Poland and Britain and 'the Orient' than Edward Said might have allowed for' (David Worthington in a review of 'Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795' in 'The Scottish Historical Review', Vol. 89, No. 227, Part 1 (April 2010), p. 115).