De Proposito

The project aims to produce a critical catalogue of the emblematic cycles preserved in Cistercian abbeys of the former Commonwealth, to identify the graphic and literary sources of individual compositions, and to describe how printed models travelled from emblem books onto walls, vaults, choir stalls and manuscript pages. The catalogue will be publicly available and multilingual.

1. 01Which printed emblem books circulated in Cistercian libraries, and in what form did they reach the workshops executing the decorations?
2. 02How does an emblem change when it moves from the printed page to the wall: what survives of the inscriptio, of the pictura, and of the subscriptio?
3. 03Was there a distinct Cistercian emblematic repertoire, different from that of other orders active in the same period?

The work rests on field and archival research: photographic documentation in situ, study of early printed books and of monastic inventories. The material is described according to the threefold structure of the emblem, which allows painted realisations to be compared with their printed models. Every source identification receives one of three attribution grades: certain, probable, open.

Year one: library and archival research, construction of the data model. Year two: field documentation in the abbeys, publication of a working version of the database. Year three: comparative analysis, scholarly publications, release of the full catalogue with its index of motifs.

• Magdalena Ficoń

  principal investigator

• Magdalena Górska

  academic supervisor

The project is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, application number 593363. Host institution: the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków.

Comments, corrections and information about emblematic cycles unknown to us are particularly valuable to the project.