On 30 September 1694, “with Archimandrite Ioan serving as abbot and Cernica, formerly a soldier, serving as steward, following the ‘Pârvul Stolnicului’’, the painters Constantinos, Ioan, Andrei, Stan, Neagoe and Ioachim were finishing the painting of the ‘delightful, beautiful and skilfully executed narthex’1 of the great church at Hurezi, inside this room, which was none other than the narthex of the edifice designed by Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu and built by the craftsmen led by Manea, the ‘foreman of the masons’, one could discover, along the western, northern and southern walls, a gallery of portraits of the sort with which the last decade of the seventeenth century in Wallachia had accustomed its contemporaries.
The inscription painted in the narthex reminds us, on the date mentioned above, that in the ‘holy and divine church’ he who had already ruled Wallachia for six years ‘wished to adorn and embellish it from within with all manner of things and, painting it like no other, wished further, among other things, to have the great lineage of his noble forebears (author’s note), both paternal and maternal, depicted…”2; the pious tribute paid, in the fresco, to his ancestors, both near and far, his boyar family, his paternal and maternal ‘lineage’ with predominantly Romanian, but also partly Levantine, voivodal, and, it is suspected, imperial origins, had been carved, almost exactly as on the exterior inscription, two years earlier, — flanked by the double-headed Cantacuzene eagle, as well as the Bessarabian raven — of the central sanctuary at Hurezi Monastery, in June 1692, when Brâncoveanu’s founding vision ‘that the memory of him and of his parents, forefathers, ancestors and all the elders and noble members of his lineage (author’s note) may remain undying and be celebrated for ever’3
Almost every effigy among the nearly thirty found in the narthex of the Hurez family’s church 4 refers us to a figure also known from the chronicles of the time. On the west wall are arranged the figures of the Cantacuzinos—some contemporary, others recently deceased—the same as those painted in precisely those years by Pîrvu Mutu in the Prahova foundations of the wealthy ‘Postelnicești’ family, namely at Măgureni – where the initiative to decorate the church’s interior had been taken, also in 1694, by Șerban II Măgureanu, son of Păuna and of the great spătar Drăghici Cantacuzino – and at Filipeștii de Pădure, the church founded by Bălașa, the widow of the Grand Aga Matei Cantacuzino, which had been painted by the same master two years earlier.
In Hurezi, as in the churches just mentioned belonging to Brâncoveanu’s Cantacuzino cousin and aunt, Constantin Cantacuzino appears as ‘bed-maker to Prince Matei from the beginning of his reign until his death’ – is none other than the illustrious victim of 1663, at Snagov, of Prince Grigore Ghica and the intrigues of Leurdeanul –, his wife Ilinca or Elina, ‘the daughter of Prince Șerban’ – this refers, of course, to Radu Șerban –, as well as all their sons – a unique occurrence in the annals of Wallachia 5 – who all rose to become high-ranking officials: the aforementioned Drăghici, father of the patron who commissioned the painting at Măgureni – as well as Pîrvu, the princely steward at Hurezi, who is also depicted here – the steward Constantin, who in 1667–1668 attended the ‘Hellenomousaion’ at the University of Padua, the eunuch Matei, husband of the benefactress of Filipeștii de Pădure, spătar Mihai, founder of so many innovative places of worship in the last decade of the century – at Râmnicu Sărat and Sinaia, at Fundeni and Colțea –, Iordache the spătar and ‘Io Șărban Cantacuzino Basarab’ – the uncle and princely predecessor of Prince Brâncoveanu – together with the female descendants of the same family, among whom Stanca is also numbered – ‘the mother of Prince Constantin’. In a sequence that is less logical from a strictly genealogical perspective, but highly evocative in terms of the Brâncoveanu dynastic mindset, the Cantacuzino line is concluded, to the north, by two very close relatives – on the paternal, Basarabian side, but of Elina Cantacuzino, the wife of the founder of the family in Muntenia: namely her own father, Radu Voivode Șerban (‘I, Șărban Basarab Voivode, son of Ban Șărban’) – the founder of Comana, which gradually gradually, a Cantacuzino settlement – and her stepbrother, likewise crowned, the illegitimate son of the former, ‘Constantin Basarab’, none other than Constantin Șerban ‘Cîrnul’, the former grand serdar of Dobrenii in Ilfov, where he had built a church near a palace noted in its day for its Western-style gardens 6.
On the adjacent western wall of the same narthex, the other illustrious ‘family’ – also linked to the local Basarab tradition – that of the boyars of Brâncoveni, was likewise depicted: Preda, the vornic and paternal grandfather of Prince Constantin – his son and the princely father Papa, the postelnic, together with his wife, Stanca Cantacuzineasca (portrayed once again as the prince’s mother, whilst beyond her she appears merely as a member of the Cantacuzino family), thus forming the symbolic link between the two illustrious lineages of Saint Constantin Brâncoveanu; he too was depicted, presciently, as a crowned child (!), alongside his brother Barbu – who, by no means coincidentally, bore a Craiova-derived first name – and their great-grandfather, David the mattress-maker of Brâncoveni, husband of a first cousin of Prince Matei Basarab.
Moving on to the southern wall of the room, but in a connection that is all too obvious with the series of Brâncoveanu figures – like a ‘preface’, again not entirely justified genealogically, yet highly significant in dynastic and ideological terms – the following figures appear here: apart from Abbot Ioan, the first abbot of the princely monastery in Vâlcea, and apart from the cousin by marriage of the princely great-grandfather on the paternal side, namely Aga Matei of Brâncoveni, who became Voivode Matei Basarab (“I, Matei Basarab, Voivode, son of Danciu, former vornic of Brâncoveni”, from whom the founder of Hurez descended, therefore, in the fourth generation)–, ‘I, Laiotu Basarab, voivode… ascended the throne in the year 6902 (= 1393–1394) and reigned for 17 years’ and ‘I, Neagoe Basarab, son of Pîrvul, formerly chief steward of Craiova, by the grace of God ascended the throne in the year 7017 (= 1508–1509) and reigned for 9 years’; the dates of their reigns are incorrect both in terms of chronology and duration, being at least partially known from the chronicles compiled precisely at the time of the construction and painting of the Hurez, such as the one attributed to Stoica Ludescu, who was a chronicler of the Cantacuzino family, entitled ‘The History of Wallachia from the Time the Orthodox Christians Settled There’7
The rationale for including the Brâncoveanu family in the frieze of portraits on the southern side of the narthex at Hurezi, in connection with the Brâncoveanu family, the founder of Argeș Monastery, lay in the fact that Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu was a direct descendant of Neagoe Basarab, in the seventh generation, through Radu of Brâncoveni the bed-maker, son of Vîlsan of Caracal and nephew of Margă, the sister of the ‘new Basarab’8 As for the inclusion in the gallery of Brâncoveanu forebears of the man whom Wallachian history has recorded under the name of Laiotă Basarab or Basarab ‘the Great’
As for the inclusion in the gallery of Brâncoveanu forebears of the man whom Wallachian history has recorded under the name of Laiotă Basarab or Basarab ‘the Elder’ – ruler of Wallachia, intermittently, between 1473 and 1477 – probably the grandson of Dan II and a rival of Țepeș, as well as of Basarab ‘the Younger’ or Țepeluș 9, establishing such a lineage amongst the boyars of Brâncoveanu may prove rather difficult (incidentally, shrouded in the mists of the Middle Ages, Laiotă is the only princely figure depicted at Hurezi whose parentage is not indicated; it is not stated whose ‘son’ he is); merely suggested, it suddenly became venerable and prestigious, tracing back not only to the descendants of Mircea the Elder, but also to the founder of the Dănești branch at the end of the 14th century and, by extension, to Basarab the Founder!
The convergence of all these portraits—which are rather conventional, based on various sources that may well have been 16th- and 17th-century portraits of the founders (Curtea de Argeș for Neagoe, Arnota for Matei Basarab), painted on the western and southern walls of the narthex at Hurezi, is, in fact, centred on the focal point of the room. This refers to the group of founders on the eastern wall, separating it from the nave, comprising, on this occasion, effigies that are far more interesting from a portraiture perspective, clearly executed ‘from life’: Constantin Brâncoveanu – who is again identified as the son of the Pope the mattress-maker and the grandson of Preda of Brâncoveni, depicted symmetrically on the opposite wall, the voivode being referred to as ‘Constantin Basarab voivode’, just like Laiotă, Neagoe, Matei, Radu Șerban, Constantin Șerban and Șerban Cantacuzino, without mention of the Brâncoveanu name – Lady Maria – whose father’s name, Neagu the bed-maker, is recorded so that another at least equally notable line of descent might be mentioned, namely that of Prince Antonie of Popești, the paternal grandfather of Brâncoveanu’s wife – and the eleven children (the four sons who were sacrificed, two decades after their portrayal at Hurezi, in the bloody massacre of August 1714 in Istanbul, and the seven daughters who married into princely families – that of the ancient medieval Mușatins, those of the more recent Duca and Ruset families – into the boyar families of Băleanu, Crețulescu, Lambrino, Greceanu and that of the dragoman Mavrocordat Exaporitul).
Thus, in the first liturgical chamber of the church which Brâncoveanu had intended as the necropolis of the dynasty this monarch of lavish ostentation had sought to found – at the zenith of his reign, whilst at peace with the Sublime Porte and the Habsburgs, who were to grant him the title of ‘Reichsfürst’ a year later (January 1695) – ‘the great lineage… of his descendants and his house’, visualised with great emphasis, justifies at least two acts of a highly symbolic and ideologically charged nature: the adoption of the name ‘Basarab’ by Prince Constantin – as the voivodes of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had done before him – as well as the display of the Cantacuzino coat of arms, with its imperial allusions, featuring the double-headed eagle which, alongside the Transylvanian raven, guarded the entrance portal to the narthex itself, featuring effigies of the Brâncoveanu, Basarab and Cantacuzino families, including no fewer than six voivode figures, to which is added, in a grand finale, that of Brâncoveanu himself. A commentary on this deliberate, premeditated link to a historical tradition dating back over a century, regarded as a now-distant ‘history’ yet fully justifiable – in this regard we have already spoken of the ‘historicism’ of a Baroque nature in 17th-century Romania and the era of Brâncoveanu 10 – in this context – actually leads us to two distinct, yet constantly overlapping, aspects of the Brâncoveanu courtly mindset: the Byzantine and the Bessarabian legacies.
What is certain is that Constantin Brâncoveanu’s ‘Byzantine’ lineage, through his mother Stanca, remains an aspect of 17th-century Romanian ‘historicism’ of a Baroque nature, less pronounced than that of his descent from the Basarab family – a fact evident even in contemporary historiographical texts such as the ‘Cantacuzino Chronicle’ (which is even found in the case of those bearing the name Cantacuzino!) – for perfectly clear reasons relating to the need for a direct and resonant connection between the prince and the territory over which he ruled.
Here too, it seems, a certain princely mindset with a historicist slant had been inherited by the voivode from the time of his maternal uncle Șerban Cantacuzino11, to whom, in the very year of his death, the dedication, in Romanian translation, by Patriarch Dositei Notaras of Jerusalem at the beginning of the ‘Bucharest Bible’ served as a brief reminder of the imperial splendour of his paternal lineage (“to recount the rule of the patriarchs and counsellors of the Greek emperors”, going back as far as the time of John Vatatzes and then to that of John VI Cantacuzene)12, even though equal importance was attached by the Levantine hierarch of Greek origin to the Bessarabian lineage, native to the region, of Prince Cantacuzene, venerable if only for the mention of the lineage in Byzantine sources (“and as for Your Majesty’s maternal side, the situation was the same, for the Basarabs, as the historian known as Chalcocondylas states in the seventh book of his history, were, in the time of Sultan Murat, the father of Mehmet, he who took Constantinople, the second line of succession”)13.
Printed works from Brâncoveanu’s time continue to mention these illustrious origins, even though, naturally, the roles have been reversed compared to the era of Șerban Voivode, the paternal line now being that which descended from Basarabi, whilst the maternal line was of Byzantine origin, through the Cantacuzinos. It was Dositei, the Patriarch of Jerusalem – a figure of uncontested authority within Eastern Orthodoxy, a fact which lent his flattery all the more authority and resonance – who, in 1690, in the Greek text of his own work Manual against Calvinist Heresy – printed in Bucharest alongside a work by Meletios Syrigos – mentioning the descent of Prince Constantin from the country’s medieval dynasty, found yet another opportunity to delve into Byzantine history, reminding the voivode that, through his mother, he possessed the imperial bloodline which the eulogist traced back to the time of Alexios Komnenos 14.
Brâncoveanu’s interest in Byzantium was detected on a purely scholarly level, unlike in the case of Șerban Cantacuzino, to whom his contemporaries attributed—albeit hyperbolically—imperial ambitions, at a time, as yet unresolved, of Austro-Ottoman military confrontations prior to the Peace of Karlowitz.
15, has noted in this regard the significant presence, in the library of Hurezi Monastery – whose Greek inscription, painted in 1708, can still be seen today – of the almost complete series of Byzantine works printed in a Greek-Latin edition in the Paris of Louis XIV, under the auspices of Charles Du Cange du Fresne, the pioneer of European Byzantine studies. In this Parisian ‘Corpus byzantinae historiae’, which arrived at Hurezi shortly after its publication, historians of the Greek Middle Ages had been published, alongside those of medieval Latin culture, by the Western scholars of the ‘Great Century’; these were historians of the sort who had been made full use of by a scholar of the time such as the princely ‘old man’ Constantin Cantacuzino the steward; the catalogue of the Hurezis’ library comprised volumes published between 1645 and 1647 (Ioan Cantacuzino, Choniates) and 1686–1687 (Zonaras), featuring the works of Agathias, Acropolites, Anna Komnene, John Cynamos, Chalcocondyl, Cedrenus and Skylitzes.
As I mentioned earlier, the Brâncoveanu prints contain such references: ‘The Order of the Service of Saints Constantine and Helena’ – featuring engravings and accounts of the triumph of the Cross over Maxentius – was printed at Snagov in 1696 16, the following year, also there, a ‘Panegyric Discourse on Emperor Constantine’, the one ‘like the apostles’17 appeared, printed by Antim Ivireanul, the same scholar and hierarch who, in 1701, also in Greek, had printed in Bucharest the ‘Panegyric Address to the Great Constantine’, which again included engravings, delivered by Ștefan Brâncoveanu, the prince-heir who likened his father to the ‘apostle-like’ son of Empress Helena18.
Always closely associated with Constantine the Great, the son of Papa of Brâncoveni would once again be symbolically linked to the son of Constantine Chlorus – as Stephen the Great had been before – in the iconography with clear historical undertones in the ever-evoked narthex at Hurezi: it is known that the scene – which is, incidentally, quite extensive – depicting Constantine’s famous victory at the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312 against the pagan Maxentius, under the sign of a cross mentioned in the sources, which entered into legend and was officially recognised the following year by the no less famous Edict of Milan, was, not coincidentally, painted on the same eastern wall of the narthex where the founding fresco, dominated by the figure of Prince Constantine, the ‘new Constantine’ of the late 17th century; just as the presence of the proto-Byzantine imperial couple Constantine and Helena, as sanctified and protective figures in virtually all of the Brâncoveanu foundations – in icons, in mural paintings, in liturgical silverware – cannot be unrelated to the mindset of the era.
I have also demonstrated on other occasions how the motifs of the early 16th-century foundation by Neagoe Basarab of Curtea de Argeș, found in thenecropolis of Șerban Cantacuzino on the outskirts of Bucharest, completed in the spring of 1680, could stem both from Cantacuzino’s own experience as a crowned prince—having, some time earlier, served as royal steward at the completion of that Bucharest replica of the Argeș monument, namely the metropolitan church begun by Constantin Șerban—about whom the preface to the 1688 ‘Bible’ would later specify that it belonged to Șerban Voivode, ‘his Highness’s maternal uncle’ – as well as from a clear desire to make direct reference to the Neagoean dynastic heritage. Thus, in the realm of visual propaganda, the Bessarabian lineage of the son of the Grand Chamberlain Constantin Cantacuzino and of Elina, daughter of Radu Voivode Șerban, was emphatically highlighted; a genealogy far more significant within the country’s borders, conferring absolute legitimacy, than descent from a family bearing an imperial name and with connections to Byzantine Constantinople, which the chronicler and magistrate Ion Neculce believed Șerban Cantacuzino wished to revive, as a new basileus, through an anti-Ottoman crusade 19.
The inscription at Cotroceni, like that on the founder’s tombstone, referred to him as the ‘true grandson of the late Voivode Șerban’, and thus a descendant of Radu Șerban – referred to by the same name in documents and in the narthex at Hurezi – who in turn descended from the Craiovești family 20; Șerban Cantacuzino had sought to emphasise this kinship with the Craiovești family particularly through the major restoration, in 1682, of the monastic complex in Curtea de Argeș belonging to the ‘new Basarab’, a descendant of Pârvu Craiovescu, a monument from which his own, recently completed, founder’s necropolis derived, following the lineage of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Bucharest, belonging to the Mihnești family, and the Metropolitan Church, also in Bucharest.
What they undertook here, at the behest of Șerban Voivode, was the work of the steward ‘boiarin’ Dona Pepano – founder of a hermitage in Ilfov – and the ‘nemiș’ Gligorie Cornescu from Hotin – author of a miniature scenographic work in Gheorghe Duca’s Moldova – embodied with admirable clarity an almost modern ‘archaeological’ concern with an ideological underpinning. It was, in fact, the first cultural affirmation, in our ancient civilisation, of a genealogical lineage – proclaimed by the inscription placed by Șerban Cantacuzino in August 1682, at the entrance to the church of the Argeș Monastery (‘a building of our forefathers’), where Neagoe is described as ‘the one whose mother was the ancestor of my lordship’21 – through an architectural ‘restoration’, the layout and, in particular, the columns adorned with the oriental motifs of stalactites and lily flowers were carried over to the Cantacuzino foundations in Prahova and at the country’s princely residence22.
Moving from the realm of the figurative to that of texts, I shall further demonstrate that Șerban Cantacuzino’s Bessarabian ancestry had been mentioned by Metropolitan Teodosie in the ‘political verses’ of the ‘Liturgy’ of 1680 – ‘that from his father he descends from the royal house/and from his mother likewise from the realm’ – he ‘who art the birth and upbringing of our land’23 – or in those of the ‘Gospel’ of 1682 (‘The griffins and coats of arms are signs of the kingdom/Just as the raven is seen to be the sign of the Lord’s reign’)24.
Essentially, the Brâncoveanu mindset is – from this point of view too – identical to that of the Cantacuzino family. The Hurez plan, that is, for a voivodal necropolis erected at the beginning of the reign, was a simplified version of the plan for the Neagoean sanctuary at Curtea de Argeș (where, let us recall, a gallery of predecessor voivodes, painted in the period immediately following the founder’s reign, adorned the first chamber of the church, which provides grounds for establishing a direct, conceptual link between Hurezi and Argeș). It was a variant in which Manea, the ‘foreman of the masons’, reverted to the medieval separation of the nave from the narthex by means of a wall pierced in the middle by a doorway, in which the twelve columns of the narthex at Argeș were reduced to two, arranged facing west, and in which the architectural innovation of the 17th century appears – in the case of this particular monastic plan, the spacious narthex, found in the sixth decade at the Metropolitan Church in Bucharest, and at the end of the eighth decade at the church of Cotroceni Monastery. Significantly, the Argeș model, having passed through the – consecrating – filter of the Hurez family, returned to the banks of the Dâmbovița via the church—again a monastic one—of St George the New, which Del Chiaro deemed ‘belissima’, whilst Levantine hyperbole likened it to St Sophia’s in Constantinople 25 – built in 1705–1706 by the team of craftsmen who had laboured on the construction site of the princely monastery in Vâlcea.
To gauge even more precisely the extent of Brâncoveanu’s attachment to Bessarabian tradition – and, ultimately, the origins of this ‘historicist’ mindset springing from the vernacular noble heritage – we may look back, beyond the decisive threshold of that day in October 1688 26 on which he ascended the steps to the princely throne; that is, to the time when, as a high-ranking official and princely nephew – Grand Chamberlain between December 1679 and June 1680, Grand Chamberlain between January 1682 and November 1686, and Grand Logothete between December 1686 and September 1688 – he made endowments to the most important medieval foundations of the Craiovești and Basarab families. The most striking example remains, without a doubt, that of Bistrița in Oltenia. Here, in the tone of a contemporary chronicle, seemingly echoing the style of Ludescu, an inscription dated 12 September 1683, after suggesting the venerable aura of the place of worship and the nobility of the lineage of the man who had been the Grand Ban Barbu ‘Cralevschi’, the founder (“from Barbu’s people, great and valiant men, they have maintained and guarded it”), and recalling the ‘training’ carried out here by Preda Brâncoveanu, he goes on to mention both of the prestigious Brâncoveanu lineages together: “and in these years his grandson Costandin vel spătar continues the work with even greater zeal and at even greater expense, who, on his father’s side, descends from the ancient line of the Craiovești, also known as the Băsărăbești (author’s note), and on his mother’s side, and furthermore from the ancient and imperial house of the Cantacuzenis (n.b.), wishing to honour his nobility and piety”, founded27 “during the time of Abbot Partenie, in the days of his uncle, Io Șerban, the Young Voivode”. To complete this magnificent act of endowment, the boyar – still known as – Brâncoveanu donated here, in Bistrița, between 1682 and 1687, liturgical vestments, anaphora stands, candlesticks, altar cloths and metalwork crafted in Brașov 28.
Having become prince in circumstances where his Bessarabian lineage appears to have carried considerable weight 29, the former high official left the mark of an entire Bessarabian ‘historicist’ ideology on other major foundations of his own initiative, erected after the completion of the great church at Hurezi.
Alongside the gallery of boyars and predecessor princes in its narthex stands, both ideologically and stylistically – having also been created by the team of painters from Hurezi – the unusually extensive depiction, in a votive painting unique in its kind within ancient Romanian art, of a series of Wallachian princes, in another narthex of a princely church: that of the princely court in Târgoviște. In repainting the court church of the scholar-prince who was the brother of Viteazul, Petru Cercel, Constantin Brâncoveanu, drawing on the recent experience in Hurezi of the painter Constantinos and his companions Ioan, Ioachim and Stan – who were completing their work here in 1698 – commissioned the creation of the voivodal votive painting, which vividly summarised the history of the principality south of the Carpathians in the 16th and 17th centuries. In keeping with the function of the building whose first room it adorned, this collective princely painting featured, in addition to the patrons of the architecture and painting – Petru Cercel and Constantin Brâncoveanu holding the model of the building – all the important Bessarabian princes of the period 1500–1700 who, not coincidentally – with two exceptions – had already been depicted, in a different context, in the narthex at Hurezi. Neagoe Basarab, Radu Șerban, Matei Basarab, Constantin Șerban and Șerban Cantacuzino are – on the western wall of the narthex at Târgoviște – the same as the Wallachian princes painted in the narthex at Hurezi four years earlier; the same Basarab lineage is now depicted there (with the exception of Laiotă); to these were added, in 1698, the heroic and renowned brother of the first founder, the other son of Pătrașcu the Good, namely Mihai Viteazul – so closely linked to the turbulent history of the Târgoviște court and who might have represented, in 1700, a discreet reminder of the battles of 1600, which neither Brâncoveanu’s temperament nor the climate of his time could possibly recreate – as well as a certain ‘Mihnea’, whom research generally identifies as Radu Vodă Mihnea30.
Those ‘Brustbilder der Bassaraben und vornehmsten Ahnherren der Brankowanischen Familie… an die Mauer gemalet’—painted in the palace at Mogoșoaia after 1703, I presume—must have belonged to the same ideological category of images; these were apparently arranged, most likely in a frieze, beneath the vaults of the state rooms in this princely residence, known as early as 1780 to the Swiss historian and traveller Franz Josef Sulzer’31. At the height of the reign of the munificent ‘Constantinus Bassarab de Brankowan’ – as his name was inscribed in such a Western-noble style on the precious, finely chiselled medals for the Prince of Bucharest – the images of the Brâncoveanu ancestors would, of course, have been conceived in the spirit of the conventional portraits from Hurezi and Târgoviște, during the same era in which the Saxon patrician circles of Transylvania prized albums containing watercolour portraits of Transylvanian voivodes and princes – from Ioan Zapolya to Mihail Apafi – and just a few decades before, for another Prince Constantin, Mavrocordat, a painter from Geneva like Liotard would sketch, in Iași, the likenesses of the voivodes of the land east of the Carpathians32
Finally, during Brâncoveanu’s reign, a final aspect of this historicism reflected in the monuments of the time, one which the decade of Șerban Cantacuzino’s rule had also recorded in a single – already commented upon – instance, that of the ‘restoration’ of the church at Argeș Monastery.
If the Middle Ages had not, in our lands as elsewhere, disregarded the voivodes’ pious care for the ancient monuments—illustrious and laden with symbolism—of their forebears, princely necropolises and places of worship from the time of the ‘settlement’ (at Rădăuți, in Moldavia, for example), it was not until the seventeenth century – clearly detached, in terms of mentality, from the medieval era now scrutinised through the magnifying lens of the chroniclers – that a systematic programme was undertaken – through princes in Wallachia who were deeply rooted in the Bessarabian tradition or, conversely, through rulers in Moldavia with no connection to the Musatin tradition – the restoration of ancient medieval courts and monasteries, with Matei Basarab occupying a clearly defined and highly significant chapter in this narrative, through his deliberate cultivation of the two historical traditions: the more distant tradition of Negru Vodă, and the much more recent tradition of Neagoe Basarab and the Craiovești family33.
During the reign of Constantin Brâncoveanu, the restoration of monuments to medieval forebears—whether through the voivode’s direct involvement or that of prominent boyars or high-ranking clergy—constituted a notable cultural phenomenon, thereby extending the spirit of the Mateian era. This is quite evident in certain significant additions to the architecture or wall paintings of 14th- and 15th-century churches – at Cozia or Govora, to give two classic examples – but is even more eloquently demonstrated by the Brâncoveanu residential phenomenon, within which, alongside buildings erected ‘from the ground up’, with perfectly symmetrical architectural structures befitting ‘palaces’, in the spirit of almost modern comfort (Potlogi, Mogoșoaia), we also find several ‘modernisations’ of older ‘houses’ or even those of venerable age, always situated in locations of significance in the history of the voivode’s boyar lineage or even in the history of the entire country: this was the case with the Brâncovenis, who gave their name to the princely family; the estate here was gifted to Constantin Vodă’s son, Răducanu, who in 1708 received what were known as ‘Matei Vodă’s stone houses’34; matters had unfolded in much the same way in Târgoviște, where work began in 1692–1693, under the administration of the well-known founder of that decade, the Grand Spătar Mihai Cantacuzino, his princely nephew “could no longer allow a seat such as that ancient one, following in the footsteps of his illustrious ancestors, to stand empty” 35; just as must have happened with the princely buildings of the Basarab dynasty in Bucharest, beside which Brâncoveanu erected his own houses”36, in the newest city of his reign, which was to conform least of all to the traditions of a medieval era that had left its monumental traces in other parts of Muntenia and Oltenia.
In the preface to an ‘Octoih’ which he had printed in Buzău in 1700, Bishop Mitrofan, praising Constantin Brâncoveanu for all that he had given his subjects as ‘divine fruits’ of the mind, gathered within the pages of books that appeared in his time, he regards his princely lord as the crowning glory of a princely lineage spanning the seventeenth century and comprising descendants of the same Bessarabian tradition: ‘First, this fruit-bearing labour had to be undertaken by that praiseworthy and great Lord, Io Matei Basaraba, Voivode, Your Majesty’s blessed ancestor; yet he brought forth few and unripe fruits. And Your Highness’s praised uncle, Io Șărbana Voivode Cantacozino, laboured even harder, yet his fruits were of middling quality, neither quite ripe nor quite unripe. But Your Majesty… brings ripe fruits, sweet to the taste…”37.
Leaving aside the flattery inherent in such a dedicatory text, it may be said that the fulfilment of the path begun under Matei Basarab was realised not only in the realm of the printed book, but also in that of the monuments erected and the images painted, during the reign of Constantin Brâncoveanu.
This munificent founder and splendid monarch – ‘a shrewd Danubian Solomon’38 – established the legitimacy of his rule during a century of terrible trials, of insecurity offset by ostentatious splendour. It was a necessary assertion, achieved by invoking illustrious ancestors – many of whom had occupied the thrones of Târgoviște and Bucharest in the two centuries preceding Brâncoveanu’s reign – in a spirit that had already been that of the Western Renaissance39e and Baroque, but which we also find in the Romanian context, as early as around 1600, gradually spreading throughout almost all free social circles during the 17th and 18th centuries, as a sign of the irreversible break with medieval times 40.
Of course, of course, we shall not seek artistically elaborate and credible portraits in the effigies of ancestors, boyars and princes painted in the narthexes of Brâncoveanu-style churches – in contrast to the likenesses of Prince Constantin and members of his family, painted from life, the former are nothing more than stereotypical reproductions of ancient effigies, many of which have been lost, fitting rather into the now-established series of ‘votive–decorative’ images that would span the entire eighteenth century 41 –, their significance lies less in their value as a testament to artistic sensibility than in their illumination of the historical mindset at the dawn of our modern civilisation, where Brâncoveanu’s reign marks, in any case, a distant yet decisive milestone.
- 1
N. Iorga, Inscriptions from the Churches of Romania, Vol. I, 1905, p. 186.
- 2
Ibid., p. 185.
- 3
Ibid.
- 4
For further information on these, see Al. Lapedatu, ‘Hurezi Monastery: Historical Notes’, in the Bulletin of the Commission for Historical Monuments, I, 1908, pp. 56–57. Recent discoveries of paintings at the court church in Potlogi – founded by the Grand Spathar Constantin Brâncoveanu in 1683, and probably painted on the occasion of the construction of the adjoining residence, in 1698 (perhaps by a painter from the team which, at the same time, was completing the fresco decoration of the princely church in Târgoviște) – have revealed, in the narthex, a similar gallery of portraits of princely relatives or ancestors, preserved in a precarious condition.
- 5
N. Stoicescu, Dictionary of the Great Rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia. 14th–17th Centuries, Bucharest, 1971, p. 136.
- 6
R. Theodorescu, Romanian Civilisation: Between the Medieval and the Modern. The Horizon of the Image (1550–1800), Vol. II, Bucharest, 1987, p. 22.
- 7
The History of Wallachia 1290–1690. The Cantacuzino Chronicle, ed. C. Grecescu, D. Simonescu, Bucharest, 1960. Recalling ‘Laiotă Basarab the Elder, who surrendered the country to the Turks’, the chronicle adds exactly what is stated in the inscription on the portrait—obviously fictitious—at Hurezi: ‘he reigned for 17 years’, which we know to be incorrect. As for Neagoe, who was ‘a child… of that lineage of the “banoveți” (that is, the Băsărăbești)’ (ibid., p. 15) – this should obviously be read as Craiovești – one version of the chronicle clearly states that he was “the son of Pîrvul the vornec, of the Băsărăbești lineage” (ibid., p. 20), which was also stated in the painted inscription in the narthex of Hurezea, as well as in earlier documents such as the well-known charter of Mihnea II the Turk dated 17 May 1589: Documents on the History of Romania. The Sixteenth Century. B. Wallachia, vol. V (1581–1590), Bucharest, 1952, p. 405.
- 8
R. Theodorescu, op. cit., p. 14 and pp. 50–51, note 27.
- 9
It seems to me unlikely, in 1694 – that is, two centuries later – that there should have been any confusion between the two rival Basarabs of the latter half of the 15th century, one of whom, ‘the Younger’ – ruler between 1474 and 1482, himself the grandson of Dan II – was suspected of being Neagoe Basarab’s biological father. For the full discussion regarding the alleged descent of Neagoe from Țepeluș and Neaga of Hotărani, the wife of Pîrvu I Craiovescu, see D. Zamfirescu, Neagoe Basarab and the Teachings to his son Theodosie. Controversial Issues, Bucharest, 1973, pp. 88–90. For these two Basarabs, see also C. Rezachevici, Chronology of the Rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia, Vol. I, 14th–16th Centuries, Bucharest, 2001, pp. 108–127.
- 10
Op. cit., Vol. I, Bucharest, 1987, pp. 160–163; Vol. II, pp. 89–92.
- 11
For this, see D. Ionescu, ‘Ideal and Representation. The Ideal of the Restoration of the Byzantine Empire during the Reign of Serban Cantacuzino (1678–1688)’, in Revue des études sud-est européennes, 4, 1974, pp. 523–535.
- 12
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, Early Romanian Bibliography. 1508–1830, vol. 1, Bucharest, 1903, p. 288. It is no coincidence that, amongst the revived Byzantine traditions, during the era of Brâncoveanu, I shall also include the preservation, in the library of the steward Constantin Cantacuzino—brother of Șerban Voivode and uncle of Constantin Voivode—of the manuscript copy of the treatise by the same John VI against Mahomed; Ioan Comnen’s account of the life of this 14th-century Byzantine emperor—regarded by the Cantacuzinos of Wallachia and Moldavia as their most notable forebear—was also dedicated to the steward; although the descent of the sons of Andronic Cantacuzino, grandsons of Șeitanoglu, descended from the rival of John V Palaeologus, is still a matter of debate (for bibliography, see R. Theodorescu, op. cit., II, p. 106, notes 16 and 17). The same imperial lineage of Șerban Vodă – ‘pride of the Greeks, glory of Byzantium, splendour of the Cantacuzinos’, ‘the new Solomon’ and ‘the new Ptolemy Philadelphus’ – was proclaimed in the preface to the Greek ‘Bible’ from Venice in 1687 – commissioned by the Prince of Bucharest – by Nicolae Glykys: N. Iorga, ‘Regarding the 1688 Bible and Nicolae Milescu’s 1687 Bible (excerpt)’, Bucharest, 1915, pp. 4–5.
- 13
Patriarch Dositei’s reference may well have been to that passage in the Greek chronicler’s account of the fall of Byzantium, where we are told how Iancu of Hunedoara installed Dan, who was ‘the son of Basarab’, as ruler in ‘Dacia’: this may well refer to Dan III, the rival who was crowned – in 1446–1447 – against Vlad Dracul (Laonic Chalcocondylus, Historical Accounts, ed. V. Grecu, Bucharest, 1958, p. 200).
- 14
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, op. cit., p. 305. Eight years later, this time in Romanian, the logothete Radu Greceanu addressed the voivode – whose chronicle he had begun to write in a similar laudatory vein – on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his reign, in the preface to his well-known ‘History’: ‘the nobility of Your Highness’s lineage, descended on your father’s side from Basarabi, and on your mother’s side from the imperial house, from the most blessed Ioan Cantacuzino’ – the very man to whom Dositei Notaras had also referred when speaking of Șerban Voivode – ‘whose deeds and governance have been recorded by other ancient historians, not only foreign ones, but even more so, those writtenwritten by those from the Greek Lands” (The History of the Reign of Voivode Constantin Basarab Brâncoveanu (1688–1714), ed. A. Ilieș, Bucharest, 1970, p. 52).
- 15
C. Dima-Drăgan, M. Caratașu, ‘Les ouvrages d’histoire byzantine de la bibliothèque du prince Constantin Brancovan’, in Revue des études sud-est européennes, 3–4, 1967, pp. 434–445.
- 16
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, op. cit., p. 342.
- 17
Ibid., p. 350. The same things are stated in the ‘Minei’ published in Buzău in 1698 through the efforts of Bishop Mitrofan (ibid., p. 366) and in the Buzău ‘Triodion’ of 1700 (ibid., p. 403), in a ‘Penticostar’ from 1701 – where Metropolitan Teodosie juxtaposed the likeness to ‘the great Emperor Constantine’ and descent from ‘the most glorious lineage of the ancestors... Băsărăbești’ (ibid., p. 413), in a ‘Psalter’ from the same year (ibid., p. 415) and in another from 1703 (I. Bianu, D. Simonescu, Bibliografia..., IV, Bucharest, 1944, p. 31).
- 18
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, op. cit., pp. 419–420. A second edition was published in 1702 (I. Bianu, D. Simonescu, op. cit., p. 28). In texts other than the Romanian ones, the comparison between Constantine the Great and Constantine Brâncoveanu appears, penned by the former Patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius, in the ‘Greek-Arabic Liturgy Book’ printed at Snagov in 1701 by Antim Ivireanul (ibid., p. 432) or in an Arabic ‘Psalter’ from Aleppo in 1706 (ibid., pp. 471–472); as found in rather modest yet telling sources, such as on a period sword (Medieval Inscriptions of Romania I, City of Bucharest, Bucharest, 1965, no. 1192, p. 782). On the other hand, for his ‘official’ chronicler, Radu Greceanu, Brâncoveanu was the successor – in good deeds – to Constantine the Great and Justinian (op. cit., p. 53).
- 19
Works, ed. G. Strempel, Bucharest, 1982, p. 295.
- 20
Through his grandmother Anca of Coiani – daughter of the great ban Șerban of Izvorani and of Maria, daughter of Radu Craiovescu – the legitimate confusion between the Basarab and Craiovești families arose under Radu Șerban, which was adopted by Matei Basarab; the Basarab name then became a patronymic in the second half of the 17th century, under Șerban Cantacuzino and Constantin Brâncoveanu. For the bibliography on this subject, see my study ‘A Few “New Men”, Medieval Founders’, in Medieval Itineraries, Bucharest, 1979, p. 85, note 145.
- 21
Gr. Tocilescu, The Episcopal Church of the Curtea de Argeș Monastery, Bucharest, 1886, p. 52.
- 22
This passage can be found in The Civilisation of the Romanians..., II, p. 78.
- 23
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, op. cit., p. 231, p. 234.
- 24
Ibid., p. 247; they appear in exactly the same form in the 1683 edition of Apostolul (ibid., p. 260).
- 25
R. Theodorescu, op. cit., p. 91.
- 26
N. Stoicescu, op. cit., p. 126.
- 27
N. Iorga, op. cit., pp. 194–195. The entire tone of the text is that of a chronicle, as in the passage which speaks of the destruction of Bistrița after it had been founded by Barbu Craiovescu: ‘And as for those who harboured such bitter enmity towards the cruel Prince Mihnea Dracea, he sought to wipe them from the face of the earth, bringing down their walls with cannons and other weapons’.
- 28
C. Nicolescu, Secular and Religious Silverware in the Romanian Principalities (14th–19th centuries), Bucharest, 1968, p. 140, pp. 142–144, p. 210, p. 213, p. 261, pp. 300–301. When Constantin Brâncoveanu became prince, a close relative of his from the Cantacuzino family, also well-known, the Grand Vornic Șerban II Măgureanu – son of Drăghici and first cousin of the voivode on the throne – had the infirmary of the monastery at Bistrița restored in 1709, where he is depicted alongside his wife Andreiana.
- 29
The ‘Anonymous Chronicle’ states this clearly in connection with his election to the throne: ‘and they reckoned that Constandin log. Brâncoveanu is a descendant of Matei Vodă’ (History of Wallachia from October 1688 to March 1717, ed. C. Grecescu, Bucharest, 1959, p. 5). The presence of the effigy of Matei Basarab, not only in the votive painting at Hurezi but also in other foundations of the Brâncoveanu family – at Surpatele and Brâncoveni – constitutes the visual counterpart to such a justification. The mindset of the era was highly attuned to ‘claims to legitimacy’ of all kinds, even on occasions of political significance that were almost symbolic in nature, such as the marriage of Stancă, the daughter of Brâncoveanu, to the last of the Mușatin dynasty, Radu Iliaș – the son of Iliaș Alexandru, the short-lived ruler of Moldavia between 1666 and 1668 – “being of an ancient princely lineage, descended from Pătru Vodă Rareș” (ibid., p. 34).
- 30
C. Moisescu, Târgoviște: Historical and Artistic Monuments, Bucharest, 1979, p. 205; G. Mihăescu, E. Fruchter, The Princely Court of Târgoviște, Bucharest, 1986, p. 107. I confess that for a long time I believed this Mihnea might be Mihnea III, who reigned in Bucharest in 1658–1659, believed to be descended from the Drăculești family, as the son of Radu Mihnea, an imitator – in many respects – of Mihai Viteazul and thus a fitting figure to appear in the votive painting from Târgoviște. However, a decisive argument can be put forward against this attribution: this Baroque ‘princeps et archidux Valachiae Transalpinae’, who reigned exactly three decades before the church in the princely courtyard of the former princely residence of Muntenia was painted, was far, very far from being, in 1698, a pious memory for the prince of Bucharest, since Constantin Brâncoveanu’s paternal grandfather, Preda, had been the innocent victim – as the ‘Cantacuzino Chronicle’ states – of this very same Mihnea III.
- 31
History of Transalpine Dacia, Vol. I, Vienna, 1781, p. 300.
- 32
For a bibliography on this subject, see R. Theodorescu, op. cit., vol. I, p. 178.
- 33
Ibid., op. cit., vol. II, p. 14 et seq.
- 34
V. Drăghiceanu, ‘The Brâncoveanu Princely Courts. IV: Courtyards and Mansions in Ruins’, in Bulletin of the Commission for Historical Monuments, IV, 1911, p. 60.
- 35
Radu Logofăt Greceanu, The History of the Reign..., p. 102.
- 36
R. Theodorescu, op. cit., p. 128.
- 37
I. Bianu, N. Hodoș, op. cit., p. 398.
- 38
H. Focillon, ‘L’ancien art roumain’, in Moyen Age. Survivances et reveils. Montreal, 1945, p. 190.
- 39
F. Gilbert, ‘The Renaissance Interest in History’, in Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, ed. Ch. Singleton, Baltimore, 1967, p. 379. Seventeenth-century Europe frequently invoked, through images and texts, prestigious yet fictitious lineages (which, of course, was not the case at Hurezi or Potlogi): this was the case, after 1677 in France, where the Parisian Church of Les Invalides had effigies in medallions depicting the Merovingian and Carolingian ancestors (!) of Louis XIV; or, somewhat later, in the Russia of Peter the Great, where, in 1705, Theophan Prokopovich hailed the Tsar as a descendant of the Kievan princes from the time of Christianisation.
- 40
Significantly, in the 18th century, when a certain historicist spirit was very much present in the ‘genealogical’ mindset of the boyars in Wallachia and Moldavia, particularly after 1750, when it found expression in art, literature and heraldry (R. Theodorescu, op. cit., pp. 149–152), Romanian circles in Transylvania were open to similar concerns, which were all the more natural and necessary—even compensatory—in a region where Romanians were subjected to well-known social, political and religious persecutions. It is precisely in this sense that the identification of Mihai Viteazul, alongside Constantin Brâncoveanu, in the votive painting created in 1723 at the Church of the Holy Archangels in Ocna Sibiului, where successive founders are said to have been the son of Patrașcu the Good and the son of Papa of Brâncoveni, both of whom were protectors of Transylvanian Orthodoxy (V. Drăguț, ‘An Unknown Portrait of Mihai the Brave. Notes on the Church in Ocna Sibiului’, in Buletinul Monumentelor Istorice, 4, 1972, p. 61), as well as the record – in those same southern parts of Transylvania – of a unique interest in the genealogy of his lineage, shown by a Romanian from Țara Făgărașului, Ionaș Monea of Veneția de Jos, who in 1728 had an inscription carved in stone detailing the history of his family’s lineage back to the times of the legendary Negru Vodă (P. Chihaia, ‘Negru Vodă’ in the tradition of the Făgăraș region, in From ‘Negru Vodă’ to Neagoe Basarab, Bucharest, 1976, pp. 193–197).
- 41
For further details on these matters, see my comments in the work cited above, p. 122.