Iona

The essential resemblance between the legend recorded by Bandinus in 1647 and the folk legends about the Flood, collected at two and a half centuries' distance (around 1900), is conspicuous. In all these variants (but especially in the one chronicled by Bandinus) some

To the achievement of literary impact, Argeş Monastery comes up with a simple and ingenious solution: the absolute contrast between the soft and caressed tenderness of form, on the one side, and the wild graveness of the underlying tragedy, on the other. In the style and

excerpts1. Participation and RepetitionPerhaps the most significant difference between modern man and archaic man consists in this: for archaic man, a thing or an act acquires significance only in as much as it participates in a prototype, or in as much as it reiterates

  Joy usually produces beauty and beauty produces communication. . . , as Horia Bernea once said. That is also the dominant impression that I had after having visited the Romanian Peasant Museum. Beauty and joy are being offered to the Romanian or foreign visitor, whether

Architect The architecture of a country is, perhaps, the most accurate expression of its history, and nothing can give us a more certain insight into the past and more authentic knowledge of a civilisation. By what it has achieved throughout time, Romanian architecture

In his opening speech at the inauguration of the Village Museum, Professor D. Gusti said: …We did not have the example of open air museums from the northern countries, such as Skansen, Bigdo or Lillehammer. They convey us too much romantic and ethnographical merit, focusing

Historian The National Village Museum in Bucharest is the kind of museum in which the traditional exhibition halls are replaced by authentic households, consisting of dwellings and their extensions, technical devices, churches and triptychs transplanted from their places

excerpt THE ROMANIANS' SPIRITUAL LIFE The Two Myths of Romanian SpiritualityIn any culture, there is always a central myth that discovers it and that is to be found in all its major works of art. Romanians' spiritual life is dominated by two myths that express,

How much does a museum represent in contemporary cultural life? Is it still a necessity today? Is the support provided to museology, or to be more precise, to acquisitions, specific research, conservation and restoration a good investment? All in all, is there any future

The experimental artist Grigorescu Ion has forged himself some time ago out of the painter Ion Grigorescu. Indeed, in Romanian it is rather unusual for an adult to put his family name before the forename. Customarily, this happens in official documents or in school registers,

I have never met Ştefan Bertalan. A founder of the sigma group in Timishoara, the most influential hub of constructivist experimentalism in Romanian art, Bertalan has always seemed to me somehow ill-timed, included in the canon, and confined therein. I came once into contact

Emil Popescu was an architect. His specialty was the oil factories and we can say, without any exaggeration, that wherever in the country an oil factory had been built in the last five or six years, one could easily tell it was the work of architect Popescu's skilled