DOI Heft:
Część III. Wspomnienia / Part III. Reminiscences
DOI Artikel:Ziemba, Antoni: Krystyny Secomskiej badania nad dawnym malarstwem
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.45360#0325
324
Reminiscences
into Italian art, but what a successful escapade it was! A concise line of thought, a clear text
and lively language familiarized the public with this Venetian painter’s personality and work.
Her last great treatise was Spór o starożytność. Problemy malarstwa w „Paralelach” Perrault
[The debate about antiquity: Issues in the painting in Perrault’s “Parallels”],14 a large, over 450-
page, second opus magnum.
She took Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes as a symptom of the many-
sided polemics in the Paris Academy and extracted from it the imperative of progress, mo-
dernity and emulative creation, which served as the engine of the paradigmatic antinomy of
tradition-modernity in French and European thought in the seventeenth century and later.
She presented it as a rhetorical platform, which revealed the nationalistic strategies develop-
ing behind the scenes of the famous querelle. She showed the many dimensions of academic
thinking, replacing the traditionally accepted monolith, as a formation to which generations
of theorists and artists would make references. For instance, she pointed out the germs of the
concept of historical relativism in this formation, later taken up in nineteenth-century thought,
as well as the “theory of climate” which would be popularized many centuries later by Gottfried
Semper and others. She corroborated the surprising thesis about the deep-rootedness of
Herder’s and the pre-Romantics’ concept in the academic conceptual construction expressed
in the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.
From the scholarly point of view, this book is one of the most important in Polish academic
literature of the twentieth century, one that has also been noticed and appreciated in Western
literature. But, again, what a pity that it has not been published in another language, so that it
could be read widely internationally, as it deserves to be.
Antoni Ziemba
This article was published in Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 2010, nos 1-2, pp. 216-9. a^so includes a list of
Krystyna Secomska’s writings, pp. 220-4 (collected by Tadeusz Jurkowlaniec). The National Museum
in Warsaw would like to thank the editor of Biuletyn Historii Sztuki for permission to reprint it. Some
citations have been altered to correspond to the editing rules adopted for this issue of Journal (e.g., the
quoting of bibliography in footnotes).
14 Secomska, Spór o starożytność. Problemy malarstwa w „Paralelach” Perrault (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki
Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1991). See Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 1-2 (2010), pp. 221-2.
Reminiscences
into Italian art, but what a successful escapade it was! A concise line of thought, a clear text
and lively language familiarized the public with this Venetian painter’s personality and work.
Her last great treatise was Spór o starożytność. Problemy malarstwa w „Paralelach” Perrault
[The debate about antiquity: Issues in the painting in Perrault’s “Parallels”],14 a large, over 450-
page, second opus magnum.
She took Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes as a symptom of the many-
sided polemics in the Paris Academy and extracted from it the imperative of progress, mo-
dernity and emulative creation, which served as the engine of the paradigmatic antinomy of
tradition-modernity in French and European thought in the seventeenth century and later.
She presented it as a rhetorical platform, which revealed the nationalistic strategies develop-
ing behind the scenes of the famous querelle. She showed the many dimensions of academic
thinking, replacing the traditionally accepted monolith, as a formation to which generations
of theorists and artists would make references. For instance, she pointed out the germs of the
concept of historical relativism in this formation, later taken up in nineteenth-century thought,
as well as the “theory of climate” which would be popularized many centuries later by Gottfried
Semper and others. She corroborated the surprising thesis about the deep-rootedness of
Herder’s and the pre-Romantics’ concept in the academic conceptual construction expressed
in the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.
From the scholarly point of view, this book is one of the most important in Polish academic
literature of the twentieth century, one that has also been noticed and appreciated in Western
literature. But, again, what a pity that it has not been published in another language, so that it
could be read widely internationally, as it deserves to be.
Antoni Ziemba
This article was published in Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 2010, nos 1-2, pp. 216-9. a^so includes a list of
Krystyna Secomska’s writings, pp. 220-4 (collected by Tadeusz Jurkowlaniec). The National Museum
in Warsaw would like to thank the editor of Biuletyn Historii Sztuki for permission to reprint it. Some
citations have been altered to correspond to the editing rules adopted for this issue of Journal (e.g., the
quoting of bibliography in footnotes).
14 Secomska, Spór o starożytność. Problemy malarstwa w „Paralelach” Perrault (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki
Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1991). See Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 1-2 (2010), pp. 221-2.