The Vanitas Stance in the Baroque Culture of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania A Search for Trajectories of Consciousness

Abstract

Starting from the origins of vanitas in the Old Testament and reviewing the vanitas wave in the Baroque period in Dutch culture, the article examines how this posture was expressed in Baroque Lithuania. It considers whether it was a mass phenomenon with self-evident meanings, or it should be referred to as discourse promoting reflective awareness. These questions are answered using a comparative hermeneutic analysis and the category of consciousness emphasised in the works of the sociologist Vytautas Kavolis.
Tracking consciousness trajectories helped to reveal three cultural areas: the biblical vanitas, the epicentre of Baroque vanitas in the Netherlands, and the specifics of vanitas expression in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. We noticed that the human posture in the Book of Ecclesiastes is very similar to the one that Kavolis described as a new ‘moral imagination’. As it questioned all the main aspects of human life, it was distinguished by a high level of consciousness-reflectivity. Ecclesiastes’ conclusion is the enjoyment of life, no matter how fragile or unjust it may be.
The visual art of the Netherlands, which became the epicentre of vanitas during the Baroque period, was a widespread discourse with its own symbolic expression and self-evident images that spoke of the proximity of death. These self-evident things are not necessarily reflective and internalised; they correspond more to the definition of collective consciousness rather than consciousness. However, reflectivity appears in the artist’s ingenuity: pictorial play, irony, compositional solutions.
In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania of the Baroque period, vanitas is a discontinuous discourse, which did not have much continuity with the culture of the Netherlands. In many cases, vanitas merged with the narrative of good death (bene moriendi), in which there is not much room for radical doubt, but which contains quite strict institutional frameworks of thinking. Also, in many cases, the statements and visual elements of vanitas extended the stance of the Book of Job. However, we found several ‘erosions’ in the prevailing trend: the use of the homo bulla allegory in the theme of funerals and the conscious suppression of vanitas in raising the theme of enjoyment of life. In this way, vanitas becomes an interesting indicator of the trajectories of consciousness and their change.