The Armenian Cathedral in Lviv houses a painting by Jan Henrik Rosen depicting the funeral of St Odilon, the 11th century abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Cluny, who, according to tradition, established the Feast of the Dead. The funeral of St Odilon is a unique painting because of its unusual iconography; it also stands out artistically from other scenes in the Armenian Cathedral.
Shown in life-size, the figures of three monks carry the body of the deceased church dignitary on a march. At the head of the procession walks the abbot in pontifical dress, supported by a pastoral, while two altar boys walk behind. Both the deceased and the three hooded figures accompanying the procession, painted only in white outline, can be identified by the following inscription on the margins: O SAINT | ODYLON OF SOULS | PATRON OF THE DEAD | WE GO IN CROWDS | WE THE DEAD AT | YOUR COFFIN.

These are the first four lines of a longer poetic "commentary" by the poet Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna on the easel version of Rosen's painting exhibited at the Zachęta Gallery in 1925. The poem continues as follows: "We were forgotten by the living, | Thou didst take us for Thy children unhappy. The poem continues: "Forgotten by the living, | you accepted us as your unhappy children, | torn asunder by death, | having clothed ourselves in whatever we had - we carry thunderbolts for you".

The dignitary carried on the marches is St Odilon, and the transparent figures are the spirits of the dead, who, out of gratitude for his establishment of All Souls' Day, accompany Odilon on his last journey. The abbot leading the procession, according to tradition, is St Majolus, said to be St Odilon's successor on the abbot's throne at Cluny (in fact, his successor was St Hugo). The majestic figures of the participants in the procession, their tense and pensive faces and the dark black and purple colour scheme of the whole completes the mood of mourning.

Spirits of the dead in the funeral procession
The funeral procession in J.H. Rosen's painting is accompanied by a procession of extremely imaginatively rendered spirits of the dead. Their appearance and the context in which they are depicted are quotations from late medieval Burgundian art. The ghostly figures are 'classical' pleurants, or weepers, in the Burgundian tradition escorting significant personalities to their eternal rest. The two most famous examples of Burgundian tombstones with pleurants are the tombs of Philip the Bold chiseled by Claus Sluter and Philip the Pot, attributed to Antoine Le Moiturier. It was from these that Rosen took over the figures of the pleurants, some very accurately.

Then there remains the painterly side of the depiction of the ghosts - contoured white, translucent phenomena that inspired the greatest awe in the audience. Rosen recalled that the ghosts simply appeared to him.... dreamed: '[...] in an old castle, in a tower, in France, in central France it was, I went there on New Year's Day to visit friends. I [...] I had a room up high in this basilica. And [...] I woke up early, I don't know why. And I was surprised, I sat up in bed. And such a figure came out of the wall. It was transparent, kind of in a hood, it carried a light. It was such a greenish light. And it passed me like that at the foot of the bed. Very slowly. I watched with curiosity, because [...] I was very surprised. I wasn't frightened at all. And it passed through, and died in the other wall. When it [passed], I was scared then. I didn't know what to do with myself. [...] I got out of bed and flew to my friend who lived there in the corridor and woke him up. He scolded me terribly, but they were there, I could see. [And I painted that ghost in Lvov in the Armenian cathedral. Only there are three of them there... There are three of them, they're carrying these thunderbolts and they don't have that greenish light, because it's impossible to reproduce".

St Odilon's funeral and Revelation
It is also worth noting the series of fabrics hung in the intercolumni of the cloisters that form the backdrop to St Odilon's Burial. "These fabrics" are richly decorated, woven or embroidered and - judging from the fragments visible only between the hooded figures - represent illustrations of the Apocalypse. This constitutes a reference to the funeral scene and even, as it were, a continuation of it: an allusion to the Last Judgement at which the deceased will stand, a vision of which has already accompanied the funeral liturgy in the form of the Dies irae hymn.

J.H. Rosen was careful to preserve the realities of the contemporary era in the scene depicted: he redrew almost entirely (and with astonishing fidelity!) four miniatures from an 11th-century illuminated manuscript - the Bamberg Apocalypse - more or less contemporary with St Odilon.

Interpretations of St Odilon's Burial
Rosen's depiction of the scene of St Odilon's Burial - by its unusual character and mystery - fired the imagination of his contemporaries and was sometimes interpreted in various ways: "The three figures of the monks, mary carrying, represent three degrees of religious initiation. The first one, wrapped in a hood, does not yet seem to hear the voice from beyond, the second one, with burning and focused pupils, is looking towards happiness detached from this world, and the third one is already walking in mystical concentration and listening to what only the chosen souls are allowed to see and hear" (St. Machniewicz).

From oral accounts, it is known that by identifying the middle monk as Fr Adam Bogdanowicz, these "three degrees of initiation" referred directly to his person and his path to priesthood (Fr Adam's mother, Wanda Bogdanowicz, is said to have interpreted the scene in this way). The other people depicted in the painting are (most likely): Fr Dr Karol Csesznák, as the leader of the procession "St Majolus", and the first monk in the procession is Fr Leon Isakowicz. The two clerics at the end of the procession are perhaps the Borkowski brothers, and according to another version, one of them is the Rev. Inflate Tadeusz Fedorowicz.

The above "traditional" identification of persons is confirmed, partly modified and supplemented by the description on the back of the photograph of this Rosen painting, in Fr Fedorowicz's collection. According to it, one of the altar boys is Fr Andrzej Głażewski; looking back is Fr Bogdanowicz; the next monk is Fr Isakowicz; the procession is led by Fr Csesznák, while Cardinal Desiré-Joseph Mercier rests on the marches.

The fact that Lviv clergymen are portrayed in this scene is also confirmed by a source contemporary with the creation of the paintings: "[...] six monks (portraits of Armenian clergymen well-known in Lviv) carry the corpse of St Odilon on their shoulders (portrait of the saintly Cardinal Mercier, who died during the painting of this picture)" (Sr Maria Renata of Christ). The identification of the facial features of the abbot leading the procession is further confirmed by Fr Francis Malaczynski OSB, before the war an alumnus of the Lviv Theological Seminary, writing: "In the painting 'The Funeral of St. Odilon' [...] the body of the deceased abbot is carried by the canons of the Armenian Cathedral dressed in Benedictine garb, and the abbot leading the procession has the face of Fr Karol Csesznák - a reader in catechetics at the Faculty of Theology of the Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv [...]".

Reception of the painting Funeral of St Odilon
The idea of portraying living people in paintings was very much liked by contemporaries. If one is to believe the accounts of the time and the memoirs written years later by former residents of Lviv, it was probably the most appealing of all the compositions painted in the cathedral. This was probably due to the extraordinary combination of the mysterious subject matter with its unique artistic shape, which perfectly matched the content.

The painting, excellently displayed in the middle of the north wall of the nave, immediately attracted the attention of viewers, while the unknown subject provoked conjecture and made the work an object of general interest. Not surprisingly, the painting soon became the stuff of legend.

In 2006, thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, restoration work began at the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv. Over the course of almost 15 years, numerous measures were carried out - including the protection and restoration of all the paintings whose author was Jan Henryk Rosen (among them the widely admired fresco "St Odilon's Burial"). In 2018-2019, the POLONIKA Institute has also been involved in the work carried out in the cathedral.

Source: Joanna Wolańska, The Armenian Cathedral in Lviv in 1902-1938 Architectural transformations and interior decoration, MKiDN, Warsaw, 2010.

http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/1975/1/Wolanska_Katedra_ormianska_we_Lwowie_2010.pdf