The museums and galleries are free on the last Sunday of the month, so Daina and I finally took advantage of the open house and went to three exhibits that featured Ukrainian art and iconographic collections on loan to Lithuania. The Boris Voznitsky collection is essentially in safe keeping until the war is over as there was fear an errant Russian missile might hit the gallery in Lviv. The curators didn't want to risk losing the priceless collection of paintings from all over Europe.
The collection is also a brutal reminder of what Lithuania lost in World War II. Its noble families were eradicated and their collections lost forever. Palaces fell into ruin during the Soviet years and memories virtually obliterated. It's been a slow process in reclaiming this lost heritage. Fortunately, many records still exist in Poland so art and architectural historians have been able to recover some of this valuable legacy.
We run into this constantly in our work. We currently have two projects in which we are working on former noble family estates, both very lavish in their day, but now little more than ruin. One can find some of the polychromy in the surviving walls and piece together a reasonable approximation of what the palaces would have looked like in their heyday but for the most part we choose to conserve these ruins as they are, so as not to obliterate the multiple layers of information. As John Ruskin once said, it is impossible to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.
This wasn't the case with the Palace of the Grand Dukes in Vilnius, an elaborate reconstruction project that stretched out over ten years in an effort to recreate the royal home at the base of Gediminas Castle. Most of us in the historical architectural profession weren't too keen about it, as the costly project siphoned money away from other much needed restoration works where the historic fabric was still largely intact. Here, it was essentially a fantasy based on paintings and drawings, but the federal government felt it important to have a potent symbol of the Grand Duchy and we have more or less come to accept it.
That said Valdovų Rūmų Muziejus sponsors numerous event in the arts and music, making it the signature museum in Vilnius. It is also quite the tourist attraction, as many foreigners checking out the exhibits as there were locals this past Sunday, making it a worthwhile investment.
We were most impressed by the Ukrainian iconography on display at the Arsenal. It was a small but incredibly rich collection of icons, chalices, robes and gates dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, long before the establishment of the Patriarch of Moscow. The humanity in the work is what struck us. The Virgin Mary portrayed as a very young mother, no more than a teenager, lovingly holding her baby. The intricacy of the relief on the gold chalice. The superb level of craftsmanship on the vestments. All impeccably preserved.
Russia would dearly love to get its hands on these works, as it doesn't recognize the Kievan Patriarch that was re-established in 2018. The Kremlin believes Ukraine to still be under the Patriarch of Moscow. Yet, the Archbishop of Constantinople officially recognized the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as he now plans to recognize the independence of the Orthodox Church in Lithuania, so that it too is no longer answerable to Moscow.
For many this brings back memories of the Grand Duchy when the Catholic and Orthodox churches both flourished and even a hybrid Uniate church was formed with the hope of uniting the two branches. It was relatively successful until the Grand Duchy broke apart and the Muscovites took control of much of Old Rus that stretched throughout modern day Ukraine and Belarus. The Uniate church was banned. A Russian Orthodox church was established, which denied the history of the Kievan Patriarch that dated back to the ninth century, long before even Muscovy was established in the 13th century.
If the war has any silver lining it is that all this earlier history of the region is being brought to light. Russia can no longer deny it, as it has for centuries. It is for this reason so many people have come to visit the Boris Voznitsky collection as it shows just how grand these earlier duchies were before they were subjugated to Russian rule under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and why it is so important to not allow that to happen again.
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