In Central Europe, many non-Orthodox churches and monasteries preserve nowadays miraculous images of the Virgin Mary, which originate from Byzantium as well as the Slavia Orthodoxa. The Pietas Austriaca was presented as one of the most cardinal virtues of the Habsburg Dynasty. The Marian cult propagated by the rulers had a great significance in the process of recatholization in the Habsburg Empire. Some of the old images of the Virgin Mary painted in different style and fashion were often perceived as gifts from Byzantium and venerated as miraculous objects, although they were produced somewhere else. Many of these holy images have not been researched properly regarding their history and provenance. Some of them are even in an imminent danger of being marginalised and forgotten due to a progressing secularisation of parts of the European societies. Our Round Table aims to highlight these miraculous images of the Virgin Mary within the former territory of the Habsburg Empire in order to raise the awareness of scholars and the public alike for their religious and cultural significance as part of the European heritage and to offer new contextualisations.
This paper examines the enduring legacy of Byzantine Marian icon traditions within the Jesuit visual and devotional culture of the early modern Habsburg lands. While the Society of Jesus was a leading force in the recatholisation of Central Europe, its missionary strategies were significantly informed by engagement with Eastern Christian visual motifs, particularly those associated…
The pictorial legends and exempla in the fourteenth-century manuscript from the Český Krumlov monastery (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 370) feature many scenes in which Marian images play a very active role. These pictures can be understood as meta-images that convey the meanings and functions of Marian paintings and statues within contemporary monastic culture. The role…
The story of the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria at the Nicula Monastery in Transylvania is an illustration of the religious life in the cosmopolitan buffer zones of the Polish-Russian and the Austrian-Turkish (today Hungarian-Romanian) border areas, with an Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant mixture of populations. This post-Byzantine image of the Mother…
It is generally assumed in the bibliography that the icon of Maria Candia was painted around 1540. Until the second half of the 17th century, it was located in the Church of St. Nicholas in the capital of Crete, which, like the island, was called Candia at that time and had been controlled by Venice…
In the very center of baroque Marian religiousness, especially within the framework of the Habsburg Empire, was the reverence for Holy Virgin’s miracles and her miraculous icons. For this reason, in the churches of Karlovci Metropolitan Diocese, in today’s northern Serbia (i.e. Vojvodina), founded after the Great Exodus in 1690, numerous Orthodox icons can be…