The Painted Fortified Monastic Churches of Moldavia: Bastions of Orthodoxy in a Post-Byzantine World

Abstract

In the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the principality of Moldavia—lying within the borders of northeastern modern Romania and the Republic of Moldova—emerged as a Christian frontier at the crossroads of western European, Slavic-Byzantine, and Ottoman cultures. Contacts with neighboring regions resulted in the local assimilation of select elements from distinct visual traditions. This eclecticism with respect to sources is most evident in the painted and fortified Orthodox monastic churches of Moldavia built under the patronage of two rulers, Stephen III “the Great” (r. 1457-1504) and Peter Rareş (r. 1527-1538; 1541-1546), Stephen’s illegitimate son and heir. The mural cycles painted on the interior and exterior walls of some of these churches show religious scenes interspersed with historical narratives adapted to address contemporary anxieties about a perceived Ottoman threat against the region’s political independence and religious identity. This study addresses the compound visual character of the Moldavian churches, the historical circumstances under which they were built, and the cultural connections that extended between Moldavia and its neighbors that resulted in the visual and semantic eclecticism so characteristic of late medieval Moldavian art and architecture. I also examine the varied dimensions of Orthodox monastic spaces and the visual and spatial manifestations of dynastic, spiritual, and military concerns on the part of the patrons in the monastic sphere. In engaging with the architecture, image programs, and functions of the Moldavian churches in the context of religious politics and patronage, the Orthodox liturgy, the cult of saints, and the theory of images, I analyze the extent to which these churches aided in the construction of a new sacred landscape in Moldavia, while also presenting visual responses to and commentaries on a series of crises located in the past, present, and future: the events of 1453, the declared end of the world in 1492 as predicted by some Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529. Notions of history, cultural memory, artistic integration, spatio-temporal experiences, kinds of cross-cultural rapport and modes of translation are concerns central to this study.