The Beauty of Encounter

Painted in tempera on a wooden panel in the first half of the fifteenth century (perhaps in 1411, or more likely between 1422 and 1437)¹, the mystical scene depicting three angels seated at a table is one of the masterpieces of European art. […] Andrei Rublev's Three Angels is not only an emblem of Orthodox art; it is a particular synonym for beauty and a genuine touch of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, for it is the Holy Trinity that the Angels personify. […] All three figures are painted with unsurpassed delicacy. The composition is harmonious and fluid, endowed with immaculate contours. The image is filled with sweetness, a perceptible musicality and warmth. […] Pavel Florensky said: ‘Rublev's Trinity exists, therefore God exists.’

[…] The Moscow icon inspired one of the most beautiful contemporary Silesian paintings, entitled Bread. Its author is Piotr Naliwajko, an artist living in Chorzów and a pupil of Maciej Bieniasz and Jerzy Duda-Gracz. From the very beginning of his artistic activity in the first half of the 1980s, Naliwajko resolutely turned against abstraction and the emptiness of pseudo-avant-garde tendencies. He countered the contemporary art he encountered with sound technique, attention to detail and richness of content. […] Naliwajko is a distinctive figure, an immediately recognisable artist, a painter who moves with ease through the history of painting and readily enters into a sometimes subversive dialogue with the great masters². One can read about his work more often and at greater length in the German and Dutch press than in the Polish press. In recent years, his paintings have been eagerly exhibited and purchased in the United States³. 

It is not only the beauty of Bread and its original inspiration that captivate, but above all its symbolism. Three people (like Rublev's three angels)⁴ sit at a table floating above the houses and courtyards of the Upper Silesian district of Hajduki (now Chorzów Batory). Contrary to the evident laws of gravity, they are borne aloft by an invisible force and find themselves somewhere between heaven and earth, between the Home in heaven and the earthly home. Yet the situation contains not the slightest trace of unnaturalness; on the contrary, in the full light of everyday reality it simultaneously reveals its magic and beauty. Here—as in all of Rublev's art—we encounter a covenant between heaven and earth. Naliwajko expresses the same thought. Heaven is distant but attainable. ‘In moments of quiet contemplation it reveals itself like light behind the “impenetrable veil of clouds”’⁵. 

The three people in Piotr Naliwajko's painting are the artist's father, his mother and their granddaughter, the painter's daughter. Thus they are grandparents with their granddaughter. Through this beautiful treatment, the painting may also evoke Domenico Ghirlandaio's extraordinarily tender An Old Man and His Grandson (1480/1490), one of the most loving images in Western painting.

In Piotr Naliwajko's painting, the man attentively cuts bread; seated with her back to the viewer and at the same time positioned between grandmother and grandfather, the girl spontaneously hands a slice to the woman. The woman silently touches the bread. For a moment, we have the impression that both are holding the Christmas wafer shared at the table on Christmas Eve. The scene is as real as it is magical, as everyday and ordinary as it is solemn and festive, as secular as it is genuinely liturgical. It is a true encounter.

In Polish culture, the motif of bread holds a special place and appears most often in two significant contexts: the Eucharist and references to the customs of the Polish countryside. In both Polish painting and literature, bread is a legible and powerfully emotive sign⁶. Rublev's icon is likewise a sign—a Eucharistic sign. The flesh of the animal sacrificed by Abraham, originally located in the cup, is replaced by the sign of the Eucharistic chalice. The gift of nourishment is therefore another bond connecting the two images. This sign directs the symbolism of the scene towards liturgical experience. Hands are another important semantic value connecting the two works—in Rublev, a further non-verbal sign of conversation. In Naliwajko, the protagonists' hands are focused on giving one another bread. The painting's profound poetics are significantly shaped by its delicate chromatic range and above all by the mysterious and, as often in Naliwajko, sharp light, which here gives the whole an almost sacred glow. All the figures, in Rublev and Naliwajko alike, are surrounded and bathed in light. This light is an immaterial yet visible sign of the presence of heaven, the transcendental reality that gives the images meaning. Both works seem gently overexposed. We look at them through a metaphysical mist. Even the ends of the chair legs in Bread appear unevenly scorched. An icon is painted with light that comes from God. It gives the image its shape. The image need not be illuminated by any other light. The gentle hovering of all the figures above the ground in both works gives them an impression of lightness, as though they were devoid of material weight⁷. The icon dematerialises and makes light, but does not make unreal. Irina Yazykova wrote: ‘The body in the icon is not abolished but acquires a new, precious quality’⁸. One cannot help associating this sequence with the dematerialised representations in Marc Chagall's paintings, which treat all the laws of gravity with such unaffected freedom. Yet these images are real; they are beautiful stories describing reality in painting and poetry. Chagall wrote: ‘Do not call me a fantasist! On the contrary, I am a realist; I love the earth’⁹. 

Thus the hovering of the figures is another beautiful analogy between the two works, an analogy joining the Orthodox East with the Latin West. The images are also connected by their delicate musicality, a noble melodiousness expressed through colour. The colours speaking from Rublev's icon are serene, bestow tranquillity and testify to the beauty of the reality surrounding the painter. They render it most beautifully. It is no different in Piotr Naliwajko's painting, whose Upper Silesian urban landscape is depicted in warm, lifelike colours in which browns occupy a special place. Against Rublev's spring palette, Naliwajko sets the leafless trees of autumn or winter, yet warmth emanates from the depicted space, recalling Yevgeny Trubetskoy's beautiful phrase describing the icon as ‘contemplation in colour’¹⁰. 

The two images are also connected by landscape. In Naliwajko it is the view from the studio window; in Rublev, the clear outlines of architecture in the background. Above all, however, the central point of the icon's landscape is a tree (‘God appeared to Abraham by the oaks’). Although not centrally placed in Naliwajko, it is a clear sign and reference. It is similar, similarly bent, but—unlike Rublev's depiction—leafless. […] In Bread, place matters. This clearly articulated ‘here and now’ determines the importance of the scene unfolding at the table. This is the home revealed in an inconspicuous place, amid the red bricks of the workers' tenements, amid bare tree branches, in the middle of an industrial landscape so often dominated by melancholy. Yet is this not the same God-filled world in which Rublev's three angels rest and converse—also at a table?

The table is the place around which the figures in both images gather. The table—the heart of the home. A table is not merely furniture; it is a value that gathers people and creates a community from those scattered through everyday life, summoning them together. An encounter takes place at the table, and its fruit is community. Homes without a table at their centre lack the natural axis around which the lives of their inhabitants converge. […] Encounter has the power to constitute community¹¹. Community then becomes its natural fruit. Unity is born in community—the same unity taught by St Sergius and by his pupil Nikon, who commissioned Rublev to paint the Holy Trinity. Unity was a particularly desired value in Rus' at the turn of the fifteenth century. Unity is a particularly desired value in Silesia at the turn of the twenty-first. Its symbolism also emanates from Piotr Naliwajko's painting, an epiphany of the Upper Silesian family, the heart of the Silesian ethos. 

Pavel Florensky wrote words that he applied to Rublev's Trinity. Let us also apply them to Naliwajko's Bread and treat them as a key: ‘The icon is a model of the primordial paradisiacal unity, lost through sin and ultimately regained.’ M. V. Alpatov's words sound similar: ‘The harmony here is of a particular kind: it does not reflect what has been achieved, but is born of the need to overcome the discord, violence and cruelty prevailing all around […]’¹². One must agree with scholars that Rublev looks at the world ‘with love, tenderness and understanding’.¹³ Looking at Bread, we see that it is the fruit of looking at the world with love, tenderness and understanding. 

Hundreds of years and hundreds of kilometres separate Rublev's icon from Naliwajko's painting: different times and distant spaces¹⁴. They emerged in what would seem entirely different times and places, in distinct cultural territories extending through a vast cultural space. And yet they meet. Their shared message is as self-evident as the unity of which both works are magnificent epiphanies. The revelation of unity's meaning gives rise to hope. Both works bear witness to it¹⁵. They affirm beauty and enduring love. They refer to legible signs shared by Eastern and Western Europe, including those sometimes forgotten today, such as the truth that the visible is a path towards knowledge of the invisible. Rublev remained faithful to the conviction that creation is a path to God, and therefore to Truth, and that the beauty we perceive is merely a reflection of the invisible beauty that is God. An important discovery follows from such an attitude, expressed by P. Evdokimov in poignant words: ‘Beauty comes to meet our spirit not to delight it, but to open it to the burning proximity of God as Person’¹⁶. He added: ‘If the human being strives towards Beauty, it is because he is bathed in Its light, because it lies in his very essence, because in his essence he is himself a desire for Beauty and Its image’¹⁷. Both images reveal and confirm the truth expressed by Max Scheler: the point is not that people should be as well off as possible, but that there should be as much love as possible between them¹⁸. No lack threatens the human being except a lack of love. Its presence enables us to endure in every age and attain fulfilment in every age. The encounter of different cultures, traditions, religions and languages is possible, and it is beautiful. This can be seen clearly in the light of Rublev's icon and Naliwajko's painting. Connected by common, timeless values, they radiate a light in which one can see what Nikolai Berdyaev reminded us: past, present and future understood separately will always be partial; wholeness consists in joining all three values. And the sky above Rublev's Angels and the figures in Naliwajko's painting is the same sign of hope. 

‘I love, therefore I am,’ Gabriel Marcel corrected Descartes in the twentieth century. The love shown in both works has the power to create community; it is born of community and within community. That love is also plenitude, an image of the happiness of the human being who turns towards himself and towards Mystery. In other words, what we see in both images is a moment of encounter, life's most magnificent moment, a moment that may endure for eternity.

*Dr Jacek Kurek—assistant professor at the Institute of History, University of Silesia in Katowice.

^#This text is an abridged version of a paper delivered by the author in Chorzów on 29 September 2004 during the academic conference ‘Silesia—A Place of Encounter’, organised by the Institute of History of the University of Silesia, the Upper Silesian Association, MDK Batory and the Parish of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Chorzów Batory.

1. Rublev's Holy Trinity is dated differently in the literature. We know that the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, founded in 1354 by St Sergius of Radonezh (1313–1392), was destroyed during a Tatar raid in 1408. In 1411, a wooden church was erected over the saint's tomb, and when it was moved, a stone church stood here in 1323–1424. It is unclear whether the icon was made for the wooden or only for the stone church. Without hesitation, P. Evdokimov writes that ‘seventeen years after St Sergius's death, his pupil St Nikon commissioned the outstanding icon painter Andrei Rublev to paint an icon of the Holy Trinity in memory of St Sergius.’ Elsewhere Evdokimov states that the icon was made in 1425 (The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty, Warsaw 2003, pp. 204 and 206). 

2. Piotr Naliwajko's painting Lady with a Dwarf is a subversive commentary on Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine; Cubism Is Cheerful is a joke using a quotation from Picasso's Guernica. The Grapefruit Seller, in turn, is a particular antithesis of Aleksander Gierymski's The Orange Seller. Naliwajko's work contains many such references, games and dialogues.

3. A bibliography and chronology of Piotr Naliwajko's exhibitions are provided by J. Frychel-Imiolczyk in her unpublished master's dissertation devoted to the artist, Provocation, or Piotr Naliwajko's True Painting, University of Silesia, Cieszyn 2003.

4. ‘The three angels, slender and ethereal, have greatly elongated bodies (fourteen head-lengths rather than the seven of normal proportions). The angels' wings, like the schematic treatment of the landscape, create an impression of proximity to the immaterial, of weightlessness. […] The joyous lightness of the whole, the secret of Rublev's genius, gives the vision its unique winged quality.’ See P. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon…, p. 206.

 5. A. Adamska, A Theology of Beauty in the Icons of Andrei Rublev, Kraków 2003, p. 52.

6. J. Frychel-Imiolczyk wrote: ‘The motif of bread, powerfully connected with the symbol of the Eucharist as well as with the traditional customs of the Polish countryside, is vividly present in the work of Polish artists. This religious and at the same time folk metaphor was used by, among others, Marian Kępiński in Sacrum (1984), Maciej Bieniasz in the triptych Bread (1986), Aldona Mickiewicz in The Upper Room (1986), Grzegorz Bednarski in paintings entitled Bread (1987), and Jacek K. Zieliński in the mezzotint Polish Bread (1982). Slices of bread threaded onto a chain became the subject of Zbylut Grzywacz's painting Links from the series Wiśnicz Retreats (1982–1983).’ 

7. ‘Here we participate in what St Macarius calls the “pastures of the heart”, in the infinite spaces of God's heart’ (P. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon…, p. 210). 

 8. I. Yazykova, The World of the Icon, Warsaw 2003, p. 28; and slightly earlier: ‘Bodies in the icon literally float in space, suspended above the earth without touching it with their feet’ (p. 27); A. Adamska, A Theology of Beauty…, p. 111.

9. M. Chagall, My Life, Kraków 2003, p. 131.

10. I. Yazykova, The World of the Icon…, p. 20.

11. J. Bukowski, Outline of a Philosophy of Encounter, Kraków 1987, p. 176.

12.  Quoted in A. Adamska, A Theology of Beauty…, pp. 56–57.

13.  A. Adamska, A Theology of Beauty…, p. 52.

14.  The works also differ in size. Bread measures 200 × 150 cm; Rublev's icon is smaller, measuring 142 × 114 cm. Bread is privately owned; the Holy Trinity is a flagship work of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

15.  A beautiful testimony to the emotion arising from an encounter with Bread is found in J. Frychel-Imiolczyk's dissertation. She wrote: ‘This exceptionally large canvas captivated me with its atmosphere from the first moment. This beautiful genre scene depicting three people seated at a table and sharing bread has the quality of a sacred image. If I could hang this very painting on the wall opposite my bed and fix my first gaze upon it each morning as I awoke, I would appreciate every new day of my existence; and going to sleep, I would know that every event in my life had some positive meaning’ (op. cit., pp. 75–76).

16.  P. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon…, p. 82. The author adds: ‘[…] we find ourselves in the presence of Beauty not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing can be taken away, for Beauty has no limits but tolerates no dissonance’ (ibid., p. 84).

17.  P. Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon…, p. 199.

18. M. Scheler, Ressentiment and Morality, Warsaw 1977, p. 102.