The Absence of Iconology in Romania. A Possible Answer

Art Historiography and Iconologies Between West and East Edited by Wojciech Bałus and Magdalena Kunińska First published 2024 ISBN: 978-0-367-68434-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-68435-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-13752-8 (ebk) 15 The Absence of Iconology in Romania A Possible Answer Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DOI: 10.4324/9781003137528-19 15 The Absence of Iconology in Romania A Possible Answer1 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail This chapter aims to be the first analysis of a specific trait of Romanian art historiography – that the method of iconology has not been employed so far in texts analysing art in Romania. This absence is very much connected to the way in which the art history canon was constructed, and how processes of patrimonialisation evolved. Romanian art historiography developed, as it did everywhere, as mostly a patriotic duty to discover the valuable past that could be historicised.2 And again, as in many other places, this ‘valuable past’ meant the Middle Ages.3 After the First World War, Romania comprised the territories of former Walachia and Moldova, which were supposed to have art that continued the Byzantine tradition because they were mostly Orthodox, and Transylvania, whose heritage was more connected to Central and Western Europe because it had belonged to Hungary since the Middle Ages.4 It is worth mentioning the fact that Romanian art historiography was and still is most often concentrated on the art on the territory of Romania, and that, except for some textbooks and very general art histories, few art historians wrote about art outside the borders of the modern country. To be completely clear from the outset, we use the term ‘iconology’ with reference mainly to Panofsky’s writings, which were circulated, translated, and sometimes addressed, and not its use by Aby Warburg, whose presence in the Romanian culture was extremely rare before his revaluation in the past three decades. Scholars were involved in a research project that explores the entanglements of art historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe, and that is articulated around the critical assessment of three crucial concepts: periodisation, style, and influence.5 Despite our inherent bias, we feel that investigating how these three concepts were used in Romanian art history could also explain why the perceived peripheral status of Romanian art and its belatedness actually oriented Romanian art history toward formalism – more precisely toward an overwhelming focus on style and influence that included a general disregard for interpretation.6 There have been studies of iconography that go no further than identifying scenes, and there have been attempts at placing art in a broader cultural context, treating this cultural context as mere background or setting. At the same time, looking at the art history written in the second half of the twentieth century, there is no scholar who consistently and systematically applied any principles of iconology, however defined, and there are no texts or fragments of texts that would engage with iconology as a method. One cannot argue that the work of Panofsky was not known or read. In 1925, Tudor Vianu, one of the most influential intellectuals of his time, who acted as a student of aesthetics and literary and artistic critic, published a short piece on Panofsky’s ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’ and ‘Über den Begriff des Kunstwollens’, in which he related Panofsky to Riegl and Wölfflin.7 Vianu included Panofsky in DOI: 10.4324/9781003137528-19 This chapter has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. 200 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail a chapter that deals with positivism and critical approaches in art history. In Vianu’s reading, Panofsky was included under the heading of ‘categories of artistic intuition’, in opposition to Wölfflin, whom he regarded as a positivist art historian.8 Despite his methodological interest, Tudor Vianu never made use of later writings by Panofsky in his own work.9 Moreover, Panofsky was present in various ways in Romanian culture, primarily through translations of his works, and he was also part of the curricula in art history departments. Therefore, we believe that avoiding iconology was motivated by the fact that it was not considered a suitable method, mainly because local art historiography had other objectives. Inventorying the national heritage seems to have been the most urgent. By this we are not trying to impose the perspective of an authoritative art historical pattern that implies iconology as a necessary step in a projected development of the discipline. We do not believe that the absence of iconological studies in Romanian art historiography pertains to an underdevelopment of the discipline, but rather that the theoretical perspectives of the authors are shaped by the political agendas and the nature of the objects or monuments that are investigated. Beginning with the Interwar period, the fact that art in Walachia and Moldova were supposed to continue a Byzantine tradition was unanimously accepted and the premise from which all art historians started. As the artistic manifestation of Orthodoxy, a Byzantine ‘style’ was supposed to be found in all Orthodox countries, while the art historians from those countries were willing to attach the local art production to this ‘style’ as the only imaginable way of putting their countries on the map of European art history.10 Rationalising the historical past and its art meant identifying some ‘objective’ (most often formal) general characteristics; otherwise, the architectural production of the past could not have been conceptualised as a ‘style’. In Romania, ‘rationalisation’ was most often understood as ‘nationalisation’ and it consisted of ‘discovering’ and selecting relevant ‘authentic’ architectural vestiges. In addition to that, identifying formal variants and invariants and moulding them into rational schemes of ‘development’ in time and space was as important as establishing distinctive features and carving them out of the more encompassing ‘(post-) Byzantine style’ they were supposed to belong to. Lastly, the mapping of various influences and the practice of establishing centres and peripheries were means through which ‘local tradition’ could be defined and ‘outside’ interventions could be recognised.11 Therefore, these enterprises could only be achieved at the expense of an interest in interpretation, because focus was on style and not on meaning. In Walachia, there are no monuments left from before the second half of the fourteenth century. The first two monuments date from the second half of the fourteenth century, and there is only one monument that might date from the fifteenth century.12 Therefore, the bulk of monuments date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Moldova, the first extant monuments also date from the end of the fourteenth century, but the stars of Romanian art history are the fifteenth-century churches with exterior paintings. In addition, the eighteenth century was and still is of less importance for art historiography because of the loss of autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in both Walachia and Moldavia, making it a century of political submission, which was less appealing for an art history with nationalist aims.13 This situation led to a difficult relationship with the Byzantine tradition that art historians were set to identify. Art on the territory of Romania that was prone to historicisation and patrimonialisation was conceptualised as ‘post-Byzantine’, a post- that lasted for about three and a half centuries and was much indebted to the writings of Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, who coined the concept ‘Byzance aprés Byzance’ for conceptualising the culture of the Romanian Principalities.14 The Absence of Iconology in Romania 201 As the inheritance of a Byzantine tradition was as stake, art historians tended to focus on continuity rather than difference.15 In conjunction with the fact that Byzantine art was supposed to be rather traditionalist and static, fixed in a kind of atemporal medievalness, there seemed to be enough to postulate that the wall paintings in Walachia and Moldova follow a ‘Byzantine iconography’.16 There are also rather few written sources that might be relevant for art historians. Since paintings followed what was considered a rather strict canon of Byzantine art, their sources are mostly the Bible, and in general were sources that have already been identified in Byzantine art. They did not seem to include any symbolism, and they were certainly not realistic. Only recently has attention been paid to its possible meanings, or to the deviations from a supposed canon that might be telling for a larger cultural context, and they overwhelmingly dealt with the exterior paintings of Moldavian churches.17 Since art that was relevant for analysing chronological changes was conceptualised as post-Byzantine, art history developed with a sense of belatedness and lack. Because of the influential Marxist periodisation of history, which stated that modernity started in Romania in 1821 (the year of a large peasant revolt), and because of the acute sense that there is no panel painting in Romania before the nineteenth century, the perception of belatedness became normative; in turn, it allowed conceptualising a medieval art as lasting until the second decade of the eighteenth century.18 As such, art in Romania was best studied with the intellectual instruments of the medievalists that deal with Byzantine art. What might also be specific to the Romanian context is the almost-exclusive focus on formalist issues like style. The penchant for formalism has multiple explanations. Despite being a socialist country, Marxist-derived academic studies were never very present in Romanian humanities, with the notable exception of periodisation. In particular, criticism of all arts (literature, visual arts, architecture, film) was almost exclusively formalist.19 The overwhelming disregard for all the concerns of social historians were justified by the Romanian intellectuals by suggesting that artistic expression was a form of ‘resistance through culture’. When freedom in real life was limited by the political regime, they say, it was important to maintain as much freedom as possible in the arts, and therefore art should have been ‘art for art’s sake’. As a consequence, those who wrote about it were supposed to appreciate those qualities that made art autonomous of any exterior interference, not subject to worldly rules but to its own inner logic.20 The recourse to formalism as an analysis that is objective (because it deals with obvious features and therefore eludes any ideological interpretation) continued after 1989 and has never been touched upon explicitly and critically. As a consequence, art that is marked by some ideology is seen as somewhat tainted, and the analyses that consider other things besides forms and techniques are seen as being altered by an ideology. The epistemic optimism of the objective art historian who relies on formalism went hand in hand with another sense of lack, that of a proper knowledge of art in the territory of Romania. Before being interpreted, it is still commonly held that art on Romania’s territory should first be properly recorded, listed, and described. The need for inventories and research as tools to investigate and constitute the patrimony of the modern country was already an objective of the Commission for Historical Monuments, established in Bucharest in 1892, and its Bulletin.21 From this point of view, investigating meaning is frequently something that only some future generations of scholars should engage with. Consequently, for most of the art historians writing in the second half of the twentieth century, inventory and formal description was what national art needed – and was 202 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail appropriate for its study. As interpretation was generally not intended, using iconology as a method was excluded. Additional reasons for the lack of iconological perspectives in Romanian art historiography can be forwarded when focusing on the relationship between the monuments from Transylvania and the canon of art history.22 In a sense, it could be maintained that frustrations generated by the tension between the centre and the periphery marked the ways in which Transylvania was instrumentalised in the twentieth century.23 The relevance of the medieval monuments from the eastern part of the Hungarian Kingdom for the newly created Romanian state, coupled with research tools that were shaped for investigating and inventorying medieval art, prevented almost any reference to Panofsky’s methodology in the Romanian art historiography dealing with Transylvania. For the purpose of this demonstration, the works of two of the most important art historians of the second half of the twentieth century will be discussed. Virgil Vătăşianu and Vasile Drăguţ both wrote syntheses that were dedicated to medieval art in Romania. Both were quite prolific authors, but most of their articles that engage with medieval art were studies that either accompany the work of restorers or that were mainly concerned with dating the artwork, establishing stylistic connections, and identifying iconographic themes. Therefore, the works that will be analysed are those that include some methodological concerns regarding the study of medieval art in Romania, or that propose an all-encompassing perspective on the national heritage. It is not an overstatement to say that even in current literature the medieval heritage of Transylvania overshadows the visual productions from other periods in the region, like the Renaissance and Baroque heritage. Academic publications and the research interests of scholars prove that, while a few of them are concerned with the problem of Renaissance and Baroque art in Transylvania, the focus is mostly on the medieval heritage of the region.24 One can immediately bring to mind the Saxon-fortified churches or the vast late-Gothic hall churches, but few would consider the Renaissance Lázó chapel in AlbaIulia or the sixteenth-century wall paintings decorating private houses as characteristic of Transylvania.25 The Hunyadi castle enjoys greater popularity but its prominence is largely due to its most famous owner, Matthias Corvinus, and his local roots, while the Renaissance elements of the castle are later additions to the medieval core of the monument. In fact, the second half of the fifteenth century has an ambiguous position characteristic of the various forms of Renaissance art outside of Italy, being situated between the Middle Ages and the novel Italian forms.26 Returning to the problem of historiography and to the Romanian need of conceptualising a tradition that could fit into the grand narrative of art history, it is relevant to mention that architecture always played one of the most important roles in attesting a sort of specificity of Romanian art, and medieval architecture especially. At the same time, Panofsky’s iconological method has been mainly conceptualised as a means to analyse Renaissance paintings and their content, reinforcing the normative position of Italian Renaissance in art history through the coupling of the art objects produced in this time and period with more elaborate theoretical and methodological approaches.27 So, it might be that ignoring iconology was a secondary effect of art historical discourses focused mainly on architectural monuments to prove the originality or novelty of local art. In this sense it is telling that, as Robert Born argued, one of the first writings that tries to establish the existence of Romanian architecture in Transylvania is Virgil Vătăşianu’s 1929 study dedicated to the stone churches in the county of Hunedoara.28 The research was almost entirely based on his dissertation defended in Vienna, under Strzygowski’s The Absence of Iconology in Romania 203 supervision, two years prior to its publication. Vătăşianu’s focus on the stone churches from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Haţeg region favoured the theory that they were based on older forms of local wooden architecture, thus taking on a supposed centuries-long tradition. By considering mainly technical architectural issues, Virgil Vătăşianu followed Gottfried Semper’s ideas and eluded the question of the meaning of the monuments or of the paintings that were preserved in some of these churches.29 In the same year, Vătăşianu published a short article dedicated to art history and its new methodological problems which presented his scholarly interests as being shaped by positivist notions of scientific research and objectivity.30 In some respect, this approach might be a continuation of the method proposed by Coriolan Petranu, the first academically trained art historian in Transylvania who, like Vătăşianu, was a disciple of Strzygowski.31 Petranu was the driving force behind the organising of the art history department in Cluj, as well as an ardent supporter of cataloguing the national heritage, an urgent need in the context of postwar Romania.32 Some decades later, Vătăşianu published his monumental work entitled Istoria artei feudale în Ţările române [The History of Feudal Art in the Romanian Countries], the first art historical synthesis in Romanian historiography.33 His ambition with this massive volume was to centralise previous isolated studies into a unified structure that was to explore the evolutionary system of Romanian art. In the book’s foreword, Vătăşianu deplored the lack of interest in Transylvanian art in Hungarian and German historiographies and criticised their biased interest in linking Transylvanian monuments with Western examples. However, the author points to a difference between Romanian art (made by Romanians) and the art of other ethnicities (Saxons and Hungarians), emphasising that to better understand Romanian monuments, one must know the Catholic architecture in Transylvania. Thus, architecture is the main point of interest in Transylvania for Vătăşianu, although wall paintings, winged altarpieces, and sculptures are also included to a lesser extent. His focus on monuments led to a rather unimportant part of iconography in dealing with medieval wall paintings, which are mainly analysed for him to establish stylistic connections. But looking backwards to studies that concentrated on wall paintings, one can observe that an iconographic approach that went beyond thematic recognition was not considered mandatory. Ion D. Ştefănescu’s publications on the murals of Romania were subjected to the same needs of cataloguing and contributing to the lack of local historiography. As previously noticed, iconography was not considered especially relevant because it could not be as useful as style in periodisation.34 Indeed, this was Ştefănescu and Vătăşianu’s perspective as they followed the earlier writings of art historians who also focused on documentation, cataloguing, and formalism in analysing the built heritage of Romania.35 Another landmark for Romanian historiography was a book written by Vasile Drăguţ that was dedicated to Gothic art in the country.36 Drăguţ played a central role in the Art History department of the Fine Arts University in Bucharest, but he was also instrumental in preserving the national heritage through his involvement in the protection of monuments.37 His writings about medieval art in Transylvania are still a starting point for any student who engages with this subject. Nonetheless, Vasile Drăguţ’s aim with this publication was rather different than Vătăşianu’s, and his focus on Gothic art proves that he considered it the most relevant aspect of Transylvanian art production, and one that also impacted the evolution of art in Moldova and Wallachia. Although treating with equal interest architecture, wall paintings, and other forms of visual production, the author states quite bluntly that the fortified churches in Transylvania have no equivalent in the 204 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail history of medieval architecture, hinting again that if one wanted to explore the uniqueness of the art in this region, one must look at architectural monuments. Compared to Vătăşianu, Drăguţ was more concerned with iconography, and in his chapter devoted to wall paintings, he sometimes tried to investigate iconographic traditions and the way that various themes and motives arrived in Transylvania. But even though Drăguţ published studies dedicated to the medieval iconography of wall paintings on several occasions, his analysis usually consisted of identifying themes and cataloguing the extant scenes.38 While iconography was used as a research tool for images from the Middle Ages during most of the twentieth century, this art historical method had little to do with Panofsky’s iconology. Recently, the possibility of delineating iconography from iconology has been questioned and art historians have drawn attention to the fact that even in the cases of Warburg and Panofsky the two terms are sometimes interchangeable.39 At the same time, the development of iconography has been analysed from the perspective of a threefold orientation, with Panofsky – and more generally the Warburg circle – being only one methodological possibility alongside the approaches put forth by Émile Mâle and Max Dvořák.40 For Vătăşianu and Drăguţ (although they were by no means alone in this assessment) what Panofsky has been for iconology, Émile Mâle was for medieval iconography. In this case, it does not come as a surprise that although Vătăşianu mentions Aby Warburg in a chapter devoted to the genesis of the discipline, he includes the Hamburg art historian alongside Mâle and Gabriel Millet – all three under the general heading of improvements in iconographic studies.41 However, it is worth noticing that the reception of Mâle’s iconographic studies was selective, and he was mostly used for identifying iconographic themes and motifs, disregarding what was methodologically at stake in his writings. While Mâle’s fundamental study of thirteenth-century religious art in France used written sources that are contemporary to the objects of study as a methodology, Romanian art historians rarely used texts.42 Systematic approaches were available through broad iconographic surveys, like the dictionary-like Ikonographie der Cristlichen Kunst published by Karl Künstle.43 Both Virgil Vătăşianu and Vasile Drăguţ refer to Künstle as a broader iconographic study, besides regional studies that were used for dating monuments or gathering historical data. In addition to this, Drăguţ also cites Louis Réau’s Iconographie de l’art chrétien, published in 1955, which is similar to Künstle in scope and content.44 When reading the works of Vătăşianu and Drăguţ, it seems clear that iconography is used for identifying subjects, without delving further into the more profound meaning or function that iconographic themes might disclose. The focus on style and the formal aspects was a way to connect Transylvanian art with artistic schools or regions that were considered more prestigious. It was an attempt to de-peripheralise the artistic heritage of Transylvania, and at the same time inscribe it in a grand narrative of European art. The only mention of Erwin Panofsky in the two works under scrutiny here is made by Drăguţ in his book on Gothic art in Romania, where he cites Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism in the 1967 French translation by Pierre Bourdieu, addressing the case of fourteenth-century hall churches.45 Obviously, the absence of iconology in local historiography does not imply a difference in the development of the discipline by placing it in a lower position compared to other traditions. Nevertheless, the lack of engagement with this methodology is surprising when judged against the background of translations of Panofsky’s work in Romanian.46 In addition, works by Panofsky were present in various libraries, including the library of the Institute of Art History and of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, in The Absence of Iconology in Romania 205 several languages (German, English, French, and Italian). While most art historians were able to read in at least three foreign languages, it is difficult to determine for certain what literature was available to them if they do not cite it explicitly. In any case, starting in the 1970s, Panofsky was translated at the Romanian publishing house Meridiane, while Vasile Drăguţ was the editor of the section devoted to Romanian art, and Vătăşianu wrote the preface to the translation of Udo Kultermann’s Geschichte der Kunsgeschichte.47 Meridiane was a publishing house founded in 1961 that specialised in art history books; its catalogue consisted of many translations of works by various authors, from Dvořák to Gombrich and from Białostocki to Bourdieu, including Wittkower or Sedlmayr. Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renaissances in Western Art was translated in 1974, followed by his Meaning in the Visual Arts, translated in 1980.48 Although Studies in Iconology was never translated into Romanian, Jan Białostocki’s book on the history of art theories became available in Romanian in 1977, including a whole chapter that treated Panofsky’s iconological method at length.49 Therefore, Panofsky was by no means unpopular in the second half of the twentieth century, nor was the concept of iconology unknown in art historical circles in Romania. In conclusion – and to return to the question placed at the beginning of this inquiry – how can one explain the absence of iconology in Romanian historiography? We believe that the answer might be twofold. First, it was because we had no Renaissance, not even in Transylvania – or at least not a Renaissance that could compete with the courtly Renaissance of Central European art centres in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As mentioned earlier, Romanian art historians rarely ventured into studying the Renaissance in Transylvania, and most certainly not to the extent to which they researched its medieval heritage. The canonicity of certain types of artworks could have played a significant role in matching monuments and visual production with specific research tools and methods. As Keith Moxey argued, the judgement that artworks have an intrinsic significance, whose accomplishment resides in the perfect fusion of form and content, was based on Panofsky’s experience as an art historian during the Renaissance.50 The shift from his 1932 article dedicated to the conundrums of analysing artworks to the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology, eloquently subtitled ‘Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance’, was marked by circumscribing the methodological focus solely on Renaissance art.51 Elsner and Lorenz argued that while his 1932 German article proposed a universal method of art historical interpretation that was defined as a response to the concept of Kunstwollen, the theoretical formalism of the Viennese school, and Heidegger’s reading of Kant, his first publication after moving to Princeton presents iconology as the intellectual tool for interpreting the art and culture of the Renaissance.52 For Panofsky, the perfect match between form and content became one of the means by which he establishes the differences between the medieval Renaissance and the canonical one. Thus, it might be that what is at stake here is not the reluctance toward Panofsky’s iconology, but rather toward its reception as a tool for interpreting Renaissance art. The second reason for the absence of iconology in Romanian historiography is connected to what mattered more for Romanian art historians dealing with the Middle Ages. There is a sense of urgency identifiable in their writings. Medieval heritage in Romania was being demolished even before being listed and documented, and the post-1919 situation made the redefining of national heritage mandatory for recovering and forwarding claims for art objects.53 Therefore, the need for repertories was more acute than the problem of how to interpret that heritage. Vătăşianu’s book was the first to map out the 206 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail medieval heritage of all three historical provinces of Romania. A few years later, Drăguţ starts an essential campaign of inventorying, publishing a repertory of Transylvanian medieval wall paintings, followed by a larger project of listing all the medieval murals on the territory of Romania.54 Although this was only completed in part, the research team that Drăguţ gathered is quite telling for the main purpose of this initiative, for he was joined not only by art historians, but also by epigraphists, archaeologists, and restorers. His aim was clearly that of collecting information and not that of interpreting. As conceiving an art historical tradition that could compete with the grand narrative of Western art often meant reinforcing the central role of Romania’s medieval heritage, we believe that avoiding iconology was motivated by the fact that it was not considered a suitable method for analysing the national heritage that was so significant for Romanian historiography. At the same time, focusing on formalist issues provided a gateway of escaping the ideological underpinnings that could have limited other types of art-historical interpretation. Conversely, the avoidance of Romanian art historians to adopt or adapt iconology might also point toward the limits and limitations of iconology as a method. Notes 1 I wish to express my gratitude to Cosmin Minea, who was central in editing Ada Hajdu’s ideas so that they could be included in a written form in this chapter. All remaining errors are my own. 2 Rampley et al. 2012. For Romania see Popescu 2004; Kallestrup 2006. 3 See, for example, Geary and Klaniczay 2013 and more recently Folleti and Palladino 2019. For the Romanian context, see Ţoca 2011. 4 Some authors did not deny the Western and Central European connections of the art produced in Transylvania but tried to introduce the Eastern or local and Orthodox counterpart, as in the cases of art historians Coriolan Petranu and Virgil Vătăşianu. For Petranu see especially, Ţoca 2011, 43–76. For Vătăşianu see Simon 2002; Ţoca 2011, 76–82. 5 Our project was entitled Art Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe: An Inquiry from the Perspective of Entangled Histories and, besides the two of us, our team includes Shona Kallestrup, Magdalena Kunińska, Anna Adashinskaya, and Cosmin Minea. Unfortunately, this chapter is posthumously edited by Mihnea Alexandru Mihail and Cosmin Minea since Ada Hajdu passed away suddenly in July 2020 and the project was terminated. Editors of the volume are grateful for preparing this chapter for publication. 6 For formalism and style in art history see Pinotti 2012, 75–90, 2001. 7 Panofsky 1925, 129–161, 1920, 321–39. For Vianu’s comments see Vianu 1925, 124–128. 8 Vianu 1925, 109–116. 9 Out of his many publications, see Vianu 1965, 1968. 10 The notion of a ‘Byzantine style’ developed in the nineteenth century in connection with categories like ‘Romano-Byzantine’ and ‘Romanesque’; see Nayrolles 2005. Studies on modern interpretations of Byzantium in South-Eastern Europe include Ignjatović 2014, 254–74; Marinov and Vezenkov 2015, 406–462; Pantelić 2007, 131–144. 11 For a more thorough treatment of this process, see Hajdu 2017, 394–439, esp. 394–396. 12 The monastery church of Curtea de Argeş was considered the most important monument of Wallachian architecture, being the first monument restored by Lecomte de Noüy and used as a model for Romanian pavilions at the Universal Exhibitions. See Minea 2016, 181–201. For the Romanian pavilions at Universal Exhibitions see Hajdu 2015, 47–75. 13 Oriental influences were in this case less appealing, while Viennese architects formulated the distinctiveness of architectural styles in the Balkans using forms that were considered oriental, see Hartmuth 2010, 171–184, 2014, 106–117. 14 Iorga 1935. For Iorga’s approach to old Romanian art, see Ţoca 2011, 36–38. 15 For various myths about continuity of the Romanian culture see Boia 2001. For the myth of the continuity of a nation in the Serbian context, see Pantelić 2011, 443–464. 16 Ştefănescu 1928, 1929, 1930–1932. The Absence of Iconology in Romania 207 17 As an example, see Bedros 2015, 77–94; For the concern with liturgical space, see Bedros 2019, 68–89. 18 For a general discussion of socialist art history, see Kodres, Jõekalda and Marek 2019. 19 In addition to the works of Vianu cited earlier, see also Călinescu 1941. 20 For a discussion of historiography and art historiography in Communist Romania, see Burnichioiu 2017, 104–128; Ivanovici 2017, 128–142. 21 Buletinul Comisiunii Monumentelor Istorice, Bucharest, 1892. See Ţoca 2011, 11–15. For the protection of monuments and archeological research in the context of the First World War, see also Born 2017, 215–255. 22 For different aspects of the art historical canon(s) see special section Camille 1996, 198–217. We are referring here to a more widespread and discipline-based canon of art history, and not to particular canons like the one formulated in the Soviet era; see Kodres 2019, 11–35. 23 For a perceptive general account of the centre-periphery problem, see Vlachou 2016, 9–24. 24 Actually, the work of Jolán Balogh is still one of the few syntheses that deal with Renaissance art in Transylvania, alongside the work of Sebestyén 1963. For Balogh see Török 2011, 55–73. Baroque art in Transylvania is definitely an under-researched topic which can be mainly grasped through the writings of Sabău 2002. 25 For this later aspect see Jene 2013. 26 This also seems to be implied by the inclusion of a chapter of Renaissance art at the court of Matthias Corvinus in a recent volume dedicated to medieval art in the Hungarian Kingdom; see Mikó 2018, 319–333. For a historiographic approach to the Renaissance studies in Hungary see Born 2015, 160–178. 27 Elina Räsänen argues that in medieval studies Panofsky’s method didn’t have the same impact, because in this field theoretical and historiographical questions tended to be downplayed; see Räsänen 2018, 46–47. For the normative character of Renaissance art see Wood 2002, 65–92. For the importance of Panofsky’s experience as a scholar of the Renaissance in shaping the concept of iconology, see Moxey 1986, 268–269. 28 Born 2010, 365–366; Vătăşianu 1929, 1–222. 29 Born 2010, 367. 30 Ţoca 2011, 76. Vătăşianu’s advocation for an objective and monuments-oriented methodological approach to art history was later continued in Vătăşianu 1974. 31 In addition to Ţoca 2011, see Born 2010, 362–367; Rampley 2013. 32 Ţoca 2011, 43–47. 33 Vătăşianu 1959. See also Simon 2002, 81–95. 34 Ţoca 2011, 32–34. 35 Reissenberger 1894; Romstorfer 1912, 81–94. See also the contributions of Nicolae GhikaBudeşti and Gheorghe Balş in Buletinul Comisiunii Monumentelor Istorice between 1927 and 1936. 36 Drăguţ 1979. 37 Machat 1998–1999, 17–20. 38 See especially Drăguţ 1972, 7–83. 39 Liepe 2018a, 1–4. Indeed, the first time a conceptual articulation for both terms was presented as necessary was in Hoogewerff 1931, 53–82. 40 Liepe 2018b, 18–19. 41 Simon 2002, 129. 42 Of the numerous studies dedicated to Émile Mâle, for his relevance in medieval studies see Baschet 2005, 273–288. 43 Künstle 1928–29. 44 Réau 1955–1960. 45 Drăguţ 1979, 64, n. 47. 46 For the different neighbouring historiographic tradition in regard to iconology, see Ciulisová 2010, 349–357. 47 Kultermann 1977. 48 Panofsky 1974, 1980. 49 Białostocki 1977. 50 Moxey 1986, 268–270. Moxey also pointed to the fact that most of the examples chosen by Panofsky belong to the Grand Narrative of art history as it was already produced in the 208 51 52 53 54 Ada Hajdu and Mihnea Alexandru Mihail nineteenth century. For the impact of Renaissance art in the shaping of Panofsky’s iconology, see also Elsner and Lorenz 2012, 497–498. Panofsky 1932, 103–119, 1939. Elsner and Lorenz 2012, 497–502. For Panofsky’s earlier essays see also Neher 2004, 41–51. In this case Coriolan Petranu’s writings are the most insistent on this matter. For an analysis of his writings see Ţoca 2011, 54–76. Some of the results were published in Drăguţ 1985. Bibliography Baschet, Jérôme. ‘L’iconographie médiévale. L’oeuvre fondatrice d’ Émile Mâle et le monument actuel’. In Émile Mâle (1862–1954) la construction de l’oeuvre. Rome et l’Italie, 273–288. Rome: École française de Rome, 2005. 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