Two Renaissance Europes

Last month, I travelled to Warsaw to see one of Central Europe’s international blockbuster exhibitions of 2012/13 – Europa Jagiellonica 1386-157: Art and Culture in Central Europe under the Jagiellonians. The show grew out of an art historical research project at the University of Leipzig in the early 2000s, and opened in Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic last spring. From there, a convoy of trucks packed with Renaissance art took the exhibition to Warsaw, and in January it will move onto Potsdam in Germany.

The aim of the exhibition is to showcase the depth of artistic talent, and extent of elite artistic patronage of Renaissance forms, in Central Europe in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. The first few galleries focus on the Jagiellonian dynasty themselves, who by 1500 ruled Lithuania, Poland, Bohemia and Hungary. They are represented through their portraits, pearl necklaces, initials carved in red marble, the vestments of a dynastic cardinal. The second part of the exhibition (in Warsaw, rather confusingly, housed in a completely different venue) is a great treasure chest of gilded gothic altarpieces, illuminated manuscripts, monstrances and jewelled reliquaries from Prague, Zagreb, Cracow, Bratislava and Buda. As a curatorial and diplomatic feat, bringing all these objects together is an epic achievement. The lack of any narrative about Jagiellonian Europe and its culture/s does, however, feel like a missed opportunity.

What most struck me about Europa Jagiellonica, however, was just how starkly our histories of Renaissance Europe are still stubbornly split into two – in the English-speaking world, research and teaching focus overwhelmingly on France, Italy, the British Isles, Iberia and the Holy Roman Empire. In Central European museums and textbooks, however, there is a completely different narrative focused on dynasties like the Jagiellonians. I spend a lot of my professional life explaining (and perhaps apologising for) this state of affairs – saying it is due to linguistic barriers; to a traditionally inward-looking focus among Central European historians, and to an anti Central-Europe prejudice among many western historians who assume the region is by definition marginal. But sometimes, when I stand in front of the maps like those in Europa Jagiellonica, which show that the Jagiellonians, who are regularly omitted from English Renaissance textbooks, ruled over a third of continental Europe, c. 30% of today's EU, my patience does rather give way to exasperation. It is over 20 years, a whole generation, since the end of the Cold War. You wonder, for all the talk of European integration since 1945, how long we will have to wait for a joined-up, unified account of Europe’s early modern past. And in the meantime, the Jagiellonians and their lands and peoples linger on the margins of our historic consciousness, alien, exotic and fairy-tale like, less like the flesh-and-blood Tudors than like royalty from a medieval fantasy epic, such as Game of Thrones.