Baroque Bodies Divine: Sacred Art of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
In the early modern period, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was one of the largest and most multicultural states in Europe, and its capital, Vilnius, was one of the most important outposts of Catholic Baroque culture in Central and Eastern Europe. For the first time in Estonia, this exhibition presents the extraordinary sacred heritage of this world. Drawn from the collections of the Church Heritage Museum of Vilnius Archdiocese, the exhibition brings together saints’ relics and reliquaries, silver votive offerings, precious liturgical textiles and outstanding examples of ecclesiastical silver. Many of these objects were already of exceptional religious and cultural significance in their own time, and today rank among the most important symbolic works of Lithuania’s historical memory and identity, including the Reliquary of St Casimir (1637) and the Reliquary of the Holy Blood of Christ (1641–1648).
At the heart of the exhibition are the body and sanctity in the Catholic world-view of the Baroque era. The body and blood of Christ, the relics of saints, liturgical vestments and sacred objects reveal a world in which the body mediated between the earthly and the heavenly, the visible and the invisible. The exhibition explores how sanctity acquired material and bodily form, and how faith, power, identity and the human relationship with the divine were expressed through the body.
The early modern histories of Estonia and Lithuania were closely intertwined. While northern Estonia was under Lutheran Swedish rule, southern Estonia formed part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its Catholic cultural sphere. Lithuania’s rich sacred heritage therefore opens up to our visitors a world that was once also part of Estonia’s cultural landscape, but whose material and visual traces have almost entirely disappeared here. Niguliste Museum’s historic church interior gives this encounter a particular resonance.
Team
Curators: Tomas Riklius (Vilnius University, Church Heritage Museum of Vilnius Archdiocese) and Merike Kurisoo (Art Museum of Estonia – Niguliste Museum)
Exhibition design: Sigita Simona Paplauskaitė (Lithuania)
Graphic design: Tuuli Aule
Coordinator: Annika Teras
In cooperation with the Church Heritage Museum of Vilnius Archdiocese