The Queen of Heavent by Marian Gawalewicz in the Context of Piotr Stachiewicz’s The Legend About the Mother of God

Abstract

The study seeks to examine the relations and interconnections between the ways in which the work of literature and of painting approach to the theme. The cycle of M. Gawalewicz’s legends was inspired by the cycle of P. Stachiewicz’s paintings, the latter was in turn an interpretation after the manner of painting of folk legends about the Mother of God. The literary texts which were created as a result of inspiration by the works of paintinwere a fairly common phenomenon in the literature of the second half of the 19th c. Gawalewicz’s text draws on to Stachiewicz’s paintings, yet it is not totally dependent on them. It repeats, however, a series of elements, but introduces many new elements, in this manner supplementing and explaining the contents of Stachiewicz’s cartoons. Furthermore, Gawalewicz to a wider extent reaches out on his own to Marian folk legends and introduces in his text some aspects which were not made use of by Stachiewicz. Yet both cycles are joined by the similarity of their style: emotional character, sentimentalism and being addressed to the sensitivity of a common recipient.