The Web of Images: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Early Modern Ukrainian Culture | Kultura 2025
Date and time:
Monday 29 September, 2025
06:30 - 08:00
Location:
ONLINE
Dr Maria Grazia Bartolini
📍University of Milan
Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics, University of Milan
Lecture Title:
The Web of Images: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Early Modern Ukrainian Culture
Lecture Synopsis:
This seminar focuses on seventeenth-century Ukrainian visual culture and its interactions with the verbal sphere, showing how early modern Ukrainian preachers adapted the Renaissance idea of poetry and painting as sister arts to create pictorial texts that translate some material manifestations of contemporary visual culture such as the emblem into written form.
I will argue that in early modern Ukrainian culture, the traditional concept of ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry) often intersects with what we may call ut pictura creatio divina (as is painting so is divine creation)—with an emphasis on the analogies that tie painting to God’s creation of man. Just like God “painted” man into existence so writers made use of verbal and physical pictures to visualise the moral and spiritual truths they were propounding to their audiences. Illustrations in the printed editions of many of these sermons also suggest a widespread interest in the visualisation of religious texts.
In particular, the emblematic engravings prefacing Lazar Baranovych’s sermons (1674) help readers to memorise and interiorise the major themes of the sermons, offering them a path to follow to lift the mind from sensory experience to remembrance of, and meditation on, Christ and other figures in sacred history.
Through an investigation of the mental furniture of early modern Ukrainian preachers and their audiences, in this seminar we will recover a fascinating tradition that merged word and image to build “multimedia machines” for the spiritual elevation of the faithful.
Lecturer
Dr Maria Grazia Bartolini
Dr Maria Grazia Bartolini is an Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Milan. Her research focuses on the religious culture of early modern Ukraine, with special attention to the intersection of preaching, memory, and visual arts in seventeenth-century Ukraine, the political and social aspects of homiletic and hagiographical texts, and the reception of Christian Neoplatonism in the East Slavic region. Her monographs include Piznai samoho sebe (2017), a study on Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism, which was awarded the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize; and The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching (Harvard Ukrainian Studies Series; forthcoming in late 2025). Her articles on memory, meditation, and visual imagery in early modern Ukraine were awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) Best Article Prize in 2017 and 2020, and an Honorable Mention from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2021.
