“The Bow of Covenant”: Reflections on Art in Norwid's Writings

Abstract

It is not easy to penetrate the complexity of Norwid's „spiritual organisation” and trace the conditions that ultimately led him to crystallize his views on art. Not only was he a “poet and master artist”, but he also was a thinker who sought to give theoretical underpinning to his views and a critic who aimed to spread artistic literacy in his country and to champion Polish art and art in Poland

Norwid's concept of expression assumes the necessity of embodiment of spiritual elements, i.e. primeval creative forces, but it cannot be identified with either Schelling's idealist doctrine or the dynamism of the heterodox vitalist German spiritualists, whose ideas strongly influenced nineteenth century Romanticists; Norwid evades the consequences of such theories. Nor did he himself found any theoretical system. His intuition that man is a priest and mediator of the Covenant made him see in the creative process and its products similarities to a sacrament, by analogy to the sacraments sanctioned by the Church.