Visionary views of architecture in the Lithuanian art of the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries

Architectural views in art show when and where a work of art was created and give physical space for the depicted subject. Visionary views of architecture give an illusion of desirable epoch and reveal possibilities of the artist‘s imagination under the sway of particular time rhetoric. In Lithuania, townscapes and views of architecture took off in the 19th century and evolved in two ways – documentary and visionary views. As both were created by the same artists, the depicted object is also the same – memorial architecture such as castles, residences and churches. Such selection was determined by historical circumstances and patriotic and romantic rhetoric of the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Artists were attracted by destroyed or damaged buildings which associated with the lost might of the state and idealized past of the nation. Citizens and artists remembered the architectural objects which had been changed or ruined. These buildings became blank spots of the townscape in peoples’ memory. Artists reconstructed the lacking elements and tried to fill the vacuum. In this way, old castles, churches and medieval old towns were reborn in the visionary townscapes of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. These townscapes were often collected from single imaginative details or old written and iconographic sources like puzzles (for example, works of Sigizmundas Čaikovskis, Marcelinas Januševičius, Juozapas Kamarauskas and others). The present article analyzes visionary views of Lithuanian cities and architecture, basing on historical sources and artifice. The biggest part of the visionary reconstructions is efforts to restore the destroyed and changed views of the buildings and city fragments. Different value of these works was determined by the lack of historical knowledge and accessibility to it and subjective interpretations and aims of the artists. [...]Vytauto Didžiojo universiteta