Article by Władysław Kozicki published in the journal "Sztuki Piękne",1931, no. 12, pp. 443-451 (public domain, reprinted from the Library of the University of Silesia, Katowice) under the title "Mural paintings by Jan Henryk Rosen in the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv". It presents the history of creation and a detailed description of the mural paintings done by Rosen in tempera in the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv in 1925-1927 and 1928-1929. The article includes reproductions of the paintings.

A modernised reading of the text

Wall paintings by Jan Henryk Rosen in the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv.

In former, happier times for art, especially in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, the main promoters and patrons of art were, as we know, the churches and courts of powerful rulers, popes, secular monarchs and lordly princes, as well as rich municipal associations. The need for worship on the one hand, and the lust for splendour and glamour on the other, created this atmosphere of aesthetic demand in which art flourished and developed. Today, art barely vegetates. It has ceased to be an article of everyday, highly felt need; its social functions have diminished almost to the point of disappearing.

The churches are content with the domain of the old ages, with the monuments of the past. Kings and emperors have disappeared from the face of the earth, and the few who remain, fearing that the same fate will befall them, prefer to invest their capital in more positive values than works of art. This category of guardians of the arts does not exist in our country. The democratic republics, which replaced the monarchies, preoccupied with the disaster of unemployment and the necessity to arm themselves more and more intensively in the age of dreams of universal disarmament, allocate ridiculously small sums of money in their budgets to the arts, and now, when the foundations of the former system are being shaken by the world crisis, when the pound sterling is collapsing and when England, proud of its wealth, is threatened with bankruptcy, they cancel them out completely.

Municipalities thought until recently that they were doing an incredible amount for the arts when they were throwing thousands and millions at theatrical circeiises. Today they don't have the money for that either. Who is left on the side of the buyers of works of art? The impoverished intelligentsia with their meagre needs for aesthetic decoration of poor dwellings. For these buyers, art has to grind its bars of gold into fine coin. Instead of the frescoes of the Sistine, instead of the halls of the Louvre and Versailles - cheap graphic boards. Demand has fallen away and supply has remained enormous. Artists today are more numerous than ever. They paint and sculpt for themselves, for critics and for platonic, nothing-buying 'art lovers' who buy their works.

In our country, would artists be able to make a living at all if they were not rescued by various teaching jobs, at the highest and lowest art schools? Art has become, so to speak, self-sufficient, it feeds on its own juices, its creators live ...from teaching art. Something of a perpetual motion machine. One of the bizarre paradoxes of today's civilisation. Under these conditions, every artistic endeavour on the grand scale of past eras, an endeavour not only intended but fully realised, must arouse - as a wholly exceptional fact - the keenest interest and particularly fervent appreciation.

The exception in the sad life of contemporary Polish art, made all the more joyful by the fact that the area where this work came to fruition was Lviv, which had fallen into disrepute and was moving further and further away from the main currents of our artistic movement, is a series of paintings in tempera, with which Jan Henryk Rosen, now a representative of the Faculty of Drawings at the Lviv Polytechnic, decorated the walls of the venerable Armenian Cathedral in 1925-1927 and 1928-1929.

Rosen was able to do his work thanks to the initiative and generous ambition of the Armenian Archbishop, Fr. Joseph Teodorovich, who, from the moment he took over as archbishop of his archdiocese, has striven and continues to strive with a truly Renaissance flair to give the temple entrusted to his care an appearance worthy of its glorious historical past, which, as far as the oldest part of the cathedral is concerned, dates back to the 1470s and is closely linked to the architectural traditions of the old cathedral in Ané, the capital of ancient Armenia. The main realisers of his ideas were the architects Franciszek Mączyński and Witold Minkiewicz, while of the painters, Józef Mehoffer, Karol Maszkowski and Jan Henryk Rosen. It can be theoretically discussed and argued whether it would not have been more desirable from the standpoint of the postulates of monumental decorative painting to carry out the project for the polychromy of the Armenian cathedral, prepared by Mehoffer in 1907. Only a small part of this extensive plan was realised, namely the mosaic in the dome of the presbyterium and its pendentives with the powerful symbol of the Holy Trinity.

The mosaic, as a painterly factor of spatial art, corresponds most perfectly to the requirement for the integrity of the decorative impression, a requirement that undoubtedly comes to the fore in the field of this art. From this point of view, the Ravenian mosaics in St. Vitale or in St. John the Baptist. Vitale or in the St. Apollinare in Classe must be given superiority even over the frescoes of Giotto or Michelangelo. However, since the issue of the Armenian Cathedral's polychromy has been dealt with in other ways, it must be said that Rosen fulfilled his task in a commendable manner and that he created a work of outstanding value.

The most important merit of these paintings is that they have their own style, which is strong and distinctive. Rozen abandoned the worn-out and trivialised Renaissance or Baroque template, but at the same time he did not take the path of revolutionary modernism, which he kept away from in general and which would have been particularly inappropriate in the church as a place of traditional religious worship. Nor did he - which would also have been within the realm of the less fortunate - apply folk motifs to religious themes.

His style is rooted in various historical artistic premises, but grows out of them with a crown of branches and foliage of completely peculiar qualities. There is something of the spiritualism of Fra Angelica and the creators of miniatures in illuminated codices at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries, as far as the sincerity and fervour of the religious spirit, the fundamental attitude in the interpretation of the iconographic side and even a certain direction in the treatment of formal motifs are concerned, there is also something of Byzantine hieraticism, manifested in the striking structural verticalism of these multiform compositions, in the deliberate and consistent real estate of the figures, which eliminates movement in space almost entirely, There is something of the idealising, mystical-sensualist romanticism and visionary fantasy of Gustave Moreau in the orjentic splendour and glamour of the liturgical vestments, dripping with gold, embroidery and precious stones.

This is combined with a bold characterological exaggeration and heroisation of some of the heads, with a sometimes Matejko-esque fierceness, further combined with a serious, calm effect of colour, stimulating contemplation and adoration, operating with large, monumental planes, dark-red, greyish-white, black and light-blue, which are only minimally modulated by the play of chiaroscuro. The diverse motifs of form and content, going back genetically to historical eras of the development of fine art, are reduced by Rosen to the common denominator of his own style, in which all the constituent elements merge into a logical and harmonious whole. The style is eminently linear, giving clear priority to form over colour, which is not the dominant and creating factor of the painterly vision, but only that which completes it, organises it and makes it clear to the eye.

The style is further plane, which most readily develops the whole action in the foreground, abandoning the illusion of depth and giving it only exceptionally in the only scene in which the scene before it is nature, and this in the sense of Puvis de Chavannes' synthetism and symbolism rather than naturalism. Thus, the style is basically anti-naturalistic and decidedly idealistic, not only in its psyche and mood, but also in its treatment of line and shape, mostly flat and not accentuating solidity, a style which, even when it introduces naturalistic elements, idealizes them and transposes them into expressive values, either through character exaggeration, or through generalization and simplification, or finally by relegating them to the role of staffage, and this in a decorative manner. The predominance of constructional verticalism in the composition of the paintings and the deliberate immobility of the figures are the strict consequences of the chosen style.

These formal factors serve perfectly well for the suggestive expression of the spiritualistic emotional and atmospheric content, which shifts all the weight and meaning of life to the side of spirituality, in which mystical ecstasy and religious contemplation are not just an indifferent and personally uninvolving artistic solution to the imposed theme, but its sincere and deep experience. The viewer's unquestionable and complete harmony between the artist's spiritual system and his work is - besides his equally obvious high intellectual and artistic culture - the most appealing feature of Rosen's paintings in the Or- der Münster Cathedral. What is more, the artist's extraordinary capacity for a completely new iconographic approach to perennial themes such as the "Sacrifice of Abraham", the "Adoration of the Shepherds", the "Entombment of St John", etc., is also worthy of mention.

An earlier cycle of paintings by Rosen, executed between 1925 and 1927, covers the walls of the nave of the Cathedral, which is the newer part of the church, built in 1630. The paintings are framed with Armenian ornamentation. Here are two compositions that are perhaps most characteristic of the artist's art. Under the window on the right side of the nave, 'John the Baptist'. Conceived symbolically, to the exclusion of all naturalism, the subject gives the impression of an orjent vision of some religious extatic.

The ascetic, sheepskin-clad body of the now dead Saint John is supported by an angel with his head painfully hung, clad - like his five companions - in richly embroidered chasubles and surplices. The Saint's legs have been seized by the inertia of death, but in the upper part of his figure the power of a supernatural miracle has infused mystical life: his hands have risen in a preaching and blessing movement, and in place of his severed head there is a halo of holiness in the shape of a solar monstrance cut with streaks of radiant cross and surrounded by rainbow circles of heavenly light. One of the angels holds a golden bowl with the Saint's tragically fanatical head, another an axe, the symbol of his passion, and a third a lamp, the symbol of his spiritual mission. To the left, beneath the vaulted semi-circular arcade, the grim figure of Herod with a Rembrandtian intensity of spiritual expression, next to him a Roman counsellor.

To the right, the agonised elongated figure of St Elizabeth, mother of the Baptist, in a robe crumpled in Donatello folds, supported by St John's disciples. The beautiful, inspired heads of the angels, surrounded by a whirlwind of bright hair, add to the charm of the mystical poetry of this painting, in which Rosen's Oriental hieraticism and approximation to the art of Gustave Moreau, especially to his visionary painting 'Salome', is most evident. The paintings on both sides of the window and above it depict (according to the explanations in the brochure X. D. Kajetanowicz; The Armenian Cathedral and its Surroundings, Lviv, 1930):

"Angels, separating the grain from the chaff", "Angels, fighting against a race of scavengers", "A woodcutter, stabbing an axe to the root of a tree, surrounded by dancing and singing children" ( XI. 16. 17).

Unfortunately, these paintings, as well as all the others that are placed on the upper parts of the walls of this part of the church, are so far from light that they are almost invisible during the day. They can only be viewed with strong electric lighting. The second composition which stands out among the paintings in the nave due to its uniqueness and artistic value is the "Burial of St O d i l o n", located on the lower left side of the nave. Iconographically an extremely rare subject, who knows if it is not the first time it has been depicted here. In any case, this abbot of the Cluniac Benedictines is unknown to the authors of the main textbooks of Christian iconography, neither the earlier Detzel nor the more recent (1926) Kunstle.

Legend has it that when Odilon, the patron saint of the souls of the dead who first ushered in All Souls' Day, was being carried to the grave, ghosts appeared and attended his funeral. This very moment was depicted by Rosen. The abbot St Majolus, wearing a mitre and with a pa-steral, beaming with a nimbus ring around his head, leads the procession. The monks in black habits carry Odilon's stiffly stretched corpse on the margins, with the ascetic head of an emaciated old man, drawn in noble profile against the golden shield of the nimbus. Two young clerics close the procession. The symbolic-decorative star-shields in the background brighten the dark, almost black tonality of the painting.

Suddenly, the procession of these real people is joined by apparitions from beyond the grave: beside each of the three monks, visible to the viewer of the painting, appear spectres in bulky habits, their heads covered with hoods, with thunderbolts in their hands. In search of an iconographic and formal point of reference for the depiction of this difficult subject, the artist was very fortunate to find motifs of French sepulchral sculpture from the second half of the 15th century. In particular, the tomb of Philip Pot, grand seneschal of Burgundy, who died in 1494, made during his lifetime by an unknown eminent sculptor between 1477 and 1485 for the Cistercian Church in Citeaux, and now kept in the Louvre, must have been deeply etched in the artist's imagination. LIderza's analogy is not only in the arrangement of the figures of the two deceased, but also in the conception of the habits-clad with head-covering capes mourners in Philip Pot's tomb and the identically conceived spectral phantoms in Rosen's painting.

This last reminiscence, very skilfully translated from the world of matter into that of the spirit, adds greatly to the charm of this unusual work, along with the suggestiveness of the atmosphere of All Souls' Day and the expressiveness of the heads of the young monks carrying the corpse. Above this painting, on one side of the stained-glass window, St George, youthful, slender, with his Slavic head gazing into the beyond, stands over the corpse of the slain dragon; on the other side is the huge, proletarian figure of St Christopher, bending under the supernatural weight of the little Jesus, whom he is carrying across the river. A landscape with rocks and flowers treated in an almost Giortesque manner. Above the window, again one of the most beautiful compositions of this hagiographic cycle: St Idzi, the hermit abbot and patron saint of game, who saves a deer chased by hunters and dogs by taking an arrow in his own arm.

The youthfulness and physical strength of the hunters, contrasted with the spiritual grandeur of the elderly saint with his stiff, hieratic posture, the poetry of the landscape, symbolically and synthetically conceived in a style contrasted with the naturalistic, Pizanella-like figures of the animals - all contribute to the extraordinary charm of this painting. Equally subtle and more esoteric in its poetry is St Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of philosophers and scholars, whose corpse is carried by two white angels against a starry sky on the same wall. Further around the entrance to the side chapel are monumental figures of Saints, invoked for various illnesses: SS. Blaise, Dyonis, Pantaleon, Achates, Barber, Margaret, Barbara, Eustace, Wit and Erasmus.

The figures are not related to each other by situation or psychology, but rather are arranged in vertical and horizontal rows, mostly frontally, with their heads surrounded by golden nimbus shields, in the style of old Christian mosaics, as are the angels and cherubs on the nave boundaries. The verticality of the arrangement is very happily varied by the oblique directional line of the half-naked St. Pantaleon, whose body hangs towards the ground, tied by both hands to the branches of a withered tree. There is originality of concept and power of expression.

The Annunciation, adjacent to John the Baptist on the right-hand wall of the nave, although showing features of the early Renaissance in the architecture of the arcaded cloister, in the conception of the figures and in their psychology is closer to the spiritualised art of the Trecento and especially the Sienese of the time. The subtlety of the spiritual expression and the fervour of the religious mood are reminiscent of the works of Lorenzetti, Simon Martini and Lippa Memmi, with the difference, however, that their soft lyricism is absent here, replaced by a sacred dignity and mystical solemnity, manifested both in the rigid hieraticism and the solemn serenity of the two figures of the mystery drama, given in a standing position: the young, blessing angel in rich, red liturgical garb and the Madonna, whose draped blue robe is arranged in generous, Gothically crumpled folds at her feet, as well as in their psychic characterisation. In the depths a stone white Jerusalem, beneath which, against the backdrop of the veil, a visionary procession to Golgotha moves. Behind the Madonna in the back is a tapestry depicting the Adoration of the Child.

The work as a whole is original in concept and profound in its depiction of the spiritual side. Next to the window, below the king, is the Annunciation, on the left the prophets Hezekiah, on the right Sts.y b and 11 a, at the top the vision of the prophet Elias: a cloud symbolising the Virgin Mary.

Above the third window of this wall, the Sacrifice of Abraham is astonishing in its freshness of iconographic elaboration and tragicism of expression. Although all the elements of representation that have become indispensable in the artistic treatment of this theme since the competition works of Ghibert/e and Brunelleschfe in 1401 are here, they have been translated without exception from naturalism to a visionary and symbolic-sacral style. The angel does not come rushing in, but stands hieratically motionless, lofty, covered in a rich, eastern, white chasuble, and with a movement that seems like a ritual, grasps Abraham's hand from which the knife falls out. Abraham, wearing a voluminous, heavily ruffled red robe, has, contrary to tradition, squatted on a stake. With a self-contained type, it has something of the power of Michelangelo's 'Jehovah' from the Sistine ceiling.

The dramatic power that shakes his enormous figure also vibrates in the figure of the exposed Isak, in whose half-hanging head and imploringly folded hands the foreboding trepidation of death is expressed extremely suggestively. The three stained-glass windows in this wall, unfortunately too sparse to illuminate the nave, were also made to Rosen's design at Białkowski's factory in Warsaw. Their colour scheme is very discreet: yellow-golden figures emerge from a natural background of colourless glass. They depict: scenes from the life of St John, the Tree of Jesse and Greek mysteries (Orpheus, the procession of Iridescence, Mithras) in honour of the 'Unknown God'. The last three paintings by Rosen, executed in the presbyterium between 1928 and 1929, are all the more fortunate than the previously described ones in that they can be viewed in full, bright daylight.

To the right is the large Crucifixion. Again, an eminently anti-naturalistic, visionary and symbolic concept, rejecting the entire Renaissance tradition and reaching back to the spiritualistic art of Fra Angelica, still imbued with the spirit of Trecento, but again without his soft, angelic lyricism, but with all the mystical solemnity of mystery and dogma. Christ, whose cross rises from the marble floor of the church, is not a real man dying, but a radiant symbol of the world's redemption, full of superhuman power.

At his feet are gathered not only those who actually witnessed the historical sacrifice of Golgotha, but, as in Fra Angelica's "Crucifixion" in San Marco in Florence, representatives of the Triumphant Church from the earliest times to the latest. And so to the left: SS. Peter, Luke, Longinus, the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist in the foreground, while in the background Ss. John Capistrano, John Nepomucene, Maurice, Blessed Andrew Bobola, the Jesuit Fr. Miguel Pro, St. Stephen and Fr. Charles de Foucauld - to the right SS. Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Thérèse of Lisieux, Gregory the Miracle-worker, Casimir, King of Poland, John Vianey, parish priest of Ars and Thomas Aquinas. The spirit of Thomas Aquinas, the spirit of theological knowledge and Dominican strict dogmatism, hovers over this entire composition. Hieratic verticalism and the principle of real estate have been carried out as closely as possible and raised still by the verticality of the pastorals and spears in the background.

To a certain extent, the only thing that breaks out of this stylistic rigour is the powerful, Rodin-esque figure of a Roman centurion sitting in deep contemplation on the stone block to the left and, in the background, the figure of one of the Legionaries playing dice for Christ's robes. In only one respect did Rosen follow the Renaissance tradition: he gave several of the saints portrait faces of prominent contemporary personalities. Thus, we get to know, in St Peter, Tadeusz Zieliński with his Poseidon-like face; in St Luke, standing next to him, Archbishop Twardowski; in St Benedict, leaning on a pastoral, Metropolitan Szeptycki (superbly heroised head); in St Thomas Aquinas, Archbishop Theodorowitz; in kneeling St Francis of Assisi, Jacek Malczewski.

On the opposite wall, the Adoration of the Shepherds, again symbolically conceived as a mystical adoration scene. A girlish Madonna and Child placed front and centre. Her pink robe and blue-gold mantle combine with her long blonde hair to form a bright chord of colour. Behind, against a neutral dark red background, angels in white robes with golden headbands. On either side of the Virgin Mary, young shepherds pay homage to her, among them one holding a candle has the face of the artist himself. The aged St Joseph on the opposite side, behind the shepherd with a lamb, is a portrait of the artist's father, the well-known painter of military and battle scenes, Jan Rosen.

This painting is exceptionally painted on canvas. In The Last Supper, placed behind the main altar, Rosen again breaks with the Renaissance tradition, which in the iconographic treatment of this subject was based on Leonardo da Vinci's genial masterpiece. The situational moment here is not the moment when Christ utters the words: "One of you will betray me". We are witnessing a mystical mystery, the institution of the Blessed Sacrament.

The strictly applied verticalism of the construction, further raised by golden stripes cutting vertically through the dark-red wall, is again reminiscent of trecento, such as Spinello Aretino's The Last Supper in the Berlin Museum. Similarly, the simplicity of the colour scheme, The golden-red tones of the background are joined by the grey-white robes of the apostles and the snow-white robe of Christ. Only the upturned and distant Judas is clad in black. The apostle with the grey beard, third from Christ on the right, again has the head of the artist's father.

In the nimbs Armenian inscriptions, denoting the names of the apostles. On the tablecloth, contour drawings of scenes from the passion of Jesus. Full of style, panache and a truly religious spirit, J. H. Rosen's paintings have contributed greatly to making the Armenian Cathedral, whose exterior is one of the most beautiful and picturesque parts of old Lviv, also one of the most interesting artistic interiors in Poland.