The figure of St Francis in the art and thought of Jerzy Nowosielski. Interior of the Reformed Franciscan Church of the Immaculate Conception of Holy Virgin Mary in the neighborhood of Azory in Kraków (1977–1978)

Abstract

One of the most popular saints, St Francis, canonized in 1228, remains “ecumenical”, venerated also by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The saint of Assisi proved especially important for the spirituality and art of the Kraków-based avant-garde painter and Eastern Orthodox thinker, Jerzy Nowosielski, who lamented that the Western Christian consciousness had completely flattened the main ideas of the saint, reducing them to naïve sentimentality. Turning back to St Francis, the artist hoped for a renewal of Christianity and the revival of contemporary theological thought. Important elements of the Franciscan tradition in Nowosielski’s art show up in his so-called Franciscan crosses: polychrome images of the crucified Christ of the croce dipinta, croce storiata type, modeled on the San Damiano Cross. Nowosielski painted dozens of such crosses, both for liturgical purposes (to fit at the top of an iconostasis or a tetrapod), and for private devotion. The figure of St Francis also appeared several times in his monumental art: the polychromes in the churches in Olszyny (1957) and in Zbylitowska Góra (1956–1957), as well as in the mosaic entitled The Stigmatization of St Francis produced for the church in Izabelin near Warsaw (1980); these, however, have not survived to the present day. His most interesting and elaborate “Franciscan” project is the interior of the Reformed Franciscan Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary in the neighborhood of Azory in Kraków, harking back to the canon of Reformed Franciscan churches: the Stations of the Cross and the large altarpiece. These works combined the spirituality of the icon with avant-garde esthetics; the artist also infused them with iconographic motifs from the Eastern Orthodox tradition: the Mandylion (used twice), the theme of Anastasis, the Orant, the Plashchanitsa serving as the last Station of the Cross (Jesus is laid in the tomb), and the images of the three convicts in scenes of the Passion, alluding to the Eastern Orthodox worship of the Good Thief. The multi-eyed depiction of the Seraph is rooted in an earlier, Byzantine angelological iconography; the stigmatization of St Francis, in turn, is modeled on 13th Italian iconography but also on the image of St Francis as seen in the stained-glass window produced by Stanisław Wyspiański for the Franciscan church in Kraków at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The elaborate symbolism of the retable of Azory combined Franciscan themes with motifs of the Eucharist and the Passion, drawing profusely on the Eastern Orthodox tradition; thanks to its concise and ascetic form, as well as its audacious colors, it took on a truly monumental dimension.