Murray Seminar: ‘‘Lion Madonnas’ and Nations: Nationalising Late Medieval Art in Early-Twentieth-Century Silesia’ with Robert Maniura, 27 January 2026, Birkbeck, 17:00—18:30 (GMT)

Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, Keynes Library and Online, 17:00 — 18:30 GMT

Silesia was a site of violent contestation and shifting territorial control in the first half of the twentieth century. The eastern part of the region – Upper Silesia – was partitioned between Germany and newly-independent Poland in 1922 in the wake of a series of violent uprisings and a problematic plebiscite. That area was reincorporated into Germany ln 1939, but after 1945 the bulk of the region, including Lower Silesia to the west, was ceded to Poland. Cultural policy was central to efforts to integrate these territories into the competing states. This paper shares some of the issues and initial observations from a project exploring the mobilisation of the visual arts and the writing of their histories in these attempts. I will concentrate on the presentation of items from the collection of sacred art in the Silesian Museum, founded in 1929 in Katowice, the capital of the new Polish Silesian Voivodship, with the stated objective of ‘demonstrating the historical and cultural connections between Silesia and the rest of Poland’. The first director of the museum was an art historian called Tadeusz Dobrowolski whose scholarly work in the 1930s concentrated on the late medieval art in the museum’s collection and the Voivodship. I follow Dobrowolski to explore the tensions in his approach and their implications for the discipline of art history.  

Robert Maniura is Reader in the History of Art at Birkbeck and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He has been a Fellow at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. He is the author of Art and Miracle in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge, 2018) and Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa (Boydell, 2004).

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