Isaac van den Blocke, malarz i menonita w Gdańsku na początku XVII w. Czy jest coś menonickiego w jego obrazach "Przed potopem" oraz "Wąska i przestronna droga"?

Abstrakt

To find a key to the moral-religious content of the paintings, Before the Flood and The Narrow and the Broad Way by the Gdańsk painter and Mennonite Isaac van den Blocke from the early 17th century, it is useful to look back a hundred years to the 1520s in Strasbourg. Certain pictures produced in the Anabaptist-spiritual circles there might be seen as prefiguring van den Blocke’s paintings. But there is no actualresemblance between the images, and van den Blocke himself probably did not know about his spiritual ancestors in Strasbourg. The connecting link lies in the common religiousthinking behind both the Strasbourg pictures and van den Blocke’s paintings.

Both paintings by van den Blocke with their pronounced moralizing reference to his own present time, fit not only into the Mennonite thought world, but also equally well into that of the moralizing Gdańsk Lutherans. The painter and Mennonite Isaac van den Blocke painted in accord with the wishes of the circle of the Lutheran Gdańsk patricians who had commissioned his work, without having to deny in so doing his own conceptions of faith. The paintings: Before the Flood and The Narrow and the Broad Way, which Isaac van den Blocke painted for the Gdańsk Protestant patricians in the early 17th century, show in the choice of subject matter and didactic visual language a close connection both with late Mediaeval as well as with early Reformation Anabaptist-Spiritualist models. Their message portrays Christian morality impacting lived reality. Thus they target a primary aspect of the Mennonite under‑ standing of faith, which reveals some similarity to Johann Arndt’s Vom wahren Christentum. The content of the paintings reaches beyond the strictures on confes‑ sional orthodoxy and can be understood as the harbinger of a burgeoning Pietism.