“Bizarre Garden. Trees in medieval miniatures”

Between 2016 and 2017, I organized a group exhibition with Ania Gawrońska and a team of students and friends devoted to trees in miniatures.

At the exhibition we presented miniatures made according to medieval techniques, whose common denominator was a tree.

Trees are an integral part of the landscape in which we live. This was felt even more deeply in the Middle Ages, when Europe was densely covered by forests. We use wood for many aspects of everyday life. It is a fuel for heating a house or cooking food. Many objects surrounding humans are made of wood. The fruits we eat is picked from trees.

The tree is therefore a natural element of many medieval miniatures, although often only as a discreet supporting actor. This will be the case in many scenes presented in miniatures, which take place in the open air. To highlight this fact, miniaturists paint a natural element of the landscape, such as trees, in art works that include animals from medieval bestiaries, hunting scenes from Livre de Chasse, or biblical scenes, e.g. the meeting of Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ, Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the depiction of the creation of the world, and many others.

Trees also appear in medieval miniatures as the foreground elements in treatises that contain descriptions of plants. Examples of such works are Tacuinum sanitatis, a medieval textbook for healthy living, Historia Plantarum or the Tudor Pattern Book.

The imagination of medieval miniaturists is grandiose. You will not find two trees the same among the countless manuscripts that have been preserved. Sometimes the trees are strange, not matching known species. Who has ever seen a blue tree, for example?! However, all of them have a lot of charm and that is why we were very pleased to work on the pieces that we presented at this exhibition.

Beautiful works were created and hosted in several places in Poland, including:

Cracow Botanical Gardens, June 2016

The Science and Didactic Centre of the Bieszczady National Park in Ustrzyki Dolne, July 2016

The Benedictine Museum in Tyniec, August 2016

The Regional Chamber of the Andrychów Region, October–November 2016

The Voivodeship Public Library in Cracow, February–March 2017

Działyński Palace in Poznań, May 2017

The Jagiellonian Library, July 2017

This year, 2019, we are pleased to present to you a new exhibition:

LADIES AND KNIGHTS

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