Exercises in Looking (Moldavian Notebooks)

This article brings together the travel notebooks kept by Anca Vasiliu, art historian and theologian, during a photographic campaign in the monasteries of Romanian Moldavia in the summer of 1996. Adopting a hybrid form blending poetic meditation and theological analysis, the text moves through several princely foundations from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries — Slatina, Putna, Balinești, Probota, Humor — examining their architecture, exterior mural paintings, and liturgical objects. The central idea is that Moldavian painting represents the culmination of an Eastern Christian reflection on the ontology of the image: progressively performative rather than illustrative, it enacts an eschatological passage from the visible toward the invisible, from the corruptible body toward the uncreated light. The article's contribution is to offer a coherent theological reading of the evolution of the Byzantine image, from Palaiologan iconicity to the exterior mural programs of the sixteenth century, articulating aesthetics, pneumatology, and eschatology.