Domnița Bălașa Church, part three
Feeling in stone
So, “here you are”, or “here you go,” as they say in samurai/ninja movies when the characters begin to sip obsessively infamous sake from ridiculous cups. We are coming to the moment of truth. To state it plainly, up until now, I have overemphasized the Western movie-style narrative of the church-agitated story while only briefly addressing the building as a stylistic embodiment of an important architectural discourse. The imbalance in my presentation stemmed from the feeling that while the church is hailed as a jewel, which it can very well be, it is no more than a cute and conventional wedding cake, which it probably is. I hope this kind of statement will not bring me to the gallow, especially since I now admit that I found several subjects of significant cultural or aesthetic interest during my exploration. Hear! 
Hear! The partially deteriorated painting illustrated here representing Princess Balaşa and her parents holding the model of probably the second church is a powerful cultural vector carrying some complex messages. The subject and the composition make it a fine example of an ex-voto marking the raising of an imposing religious building by highly ranked individuals. The tradition of votive paintings goes back to the Middle Ages and flourished during Renaissance times. The Viennese professionals who created the painting deliberately chose an Italian Renaissance revival style to mark the European connection of the House of Brȃncoveanu. Also, they brought forth the princess’ parents from the netherworlds to emphasize the unparalleled role of the Brȃncoveanu family in the endeavor as a whole. On the lance, they will introduce, through the banner inscription, the princess as the daughter of her father ONLY, (as begotten by parthenogenesis). At the 
same time, her mother, to whom she closely resembles, is shoulder to shoulder close to her. Of course, the presentation is a conceptual one. It pays homage to the father’s outstanding building records, including 46 completed projects, and asserts continuity by combining material with spiritual, and historical with imaginary.
Of equal cultural importance and by far more actual and active despite its ancientness are the relics (a tiny part of the frontal bone, to be precise) of the Holy Gregory of Nyssa. This outstanding character isn’t related to the Brȃncoveanu family, as he was born somewhere in Turkey, then the Byzantine Empire, 1300 years before the future 
Danubian prince, martyr, and saint, i.e. Constantin Brȃncoveanu.Young Gregory grew up in a famous pious intellectual family of Cappadocia, proving that knowledge and faith are not completely irreconcilable. The family counted a couple of martyrs, and at least three saints among the siblings who got the nimbus after being during lifetime high church dignitaries and prolific religious exegetes. He was never martyred, had a decent wife, and a good life, and even got accused of embezzlement. All this didn’t hamper him from producing an impressive set of religious bestsellers and staying famous until nowadays. His mortal remains or the little preserved of his basic matters are spread among a few Orthodox communities of the Balkans and elsewhere. His glory was and remained so great that his holiness is recognized beyond the Orthodox by the Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Christian congregations whose names I forgot. He is the prototype of an ecumenical clerical champion, and I felt fairly ashamed of never having heard anything about 
him before. Nobody knows how a part of him arrived, around 1792, in Romania and if the providers were pious buddies or brazen grave-diggers. The relic was presented to the church in 1970, without indication of provenance, and has stayed there since. Left of the Princess Balaşa funerary monument, above the reliquary containing his remains, according to the principle of message reiterating for slow-thinking 
people and mankind as a whole, the Saint emerges in paint from a mystic golden background. The richly ornamented, fairly clumsy embossed silver reliquary placed underneath the icon was created in 2009. The inner side of the cover is used to mark the whereabouts of the reliquary: a model of the Balasa church and an inscription. On the frontal panel is represented the Saint in an act of devotion. Flanked by two angels, and protected by the hovering image of Christ in majesty, the saint is holding another church model in his hands. Does he intend to insert it between the fortified walls of the city laying at his knees? It will be a little tight, but magic may help…
LAST NEWS: The eavesdropping interlude
While trying to tie up this post expanding and spilling beyond will and measure, I caught some animated, even heated, partisan, if you know the brand, whispering. They were of course the two parasite monks taking advantage of the cozy surroundings to indulge in one of their inane arguments. Zen pupil: Master, what do you say about this chromatic exuberance? Ha! Ha! It looks like a rainbow advertising…and the Holy Gregory, who went into a real estate frenzy! Zen master (abruptly): Attention boy! You are trespassing. I will not permit any homophobic slurs, particularly after our entire brotherhood was tagged of queerness by the so-called straights. Zen pupil (on the brink of tears): Master please, I didn’t mean to stab anybody in the back…Zen master: You better! Firstly, do not forget that the creative bunch still has hell in some countries that I will avoid naming, no offense intended, but which are very cultural, i.e. fiercely preserving some old bloody habits. Secondly, what you take for an aggressive display of acid colors, is only an illusion…The shiny, highly polished silver reliquary reflects the various light waves landing on it from all over this intensely polychromatic indoors according to the theory of smoke and mirrors. Mark my words, we are on Holly Gregory’s territory who is today running the ordinary and the extraordinary of the company, much more than the princess and her father. Respect! Real estate? I am not sure. There is an embossed model of Domnita Balasa church on the inner side of the reliquary’s cover. On the front panel the church the Holly Gregory holds in his old trembling hands, and the medieval bourg on top of which it threatens to fall, are still unidentified. Why aren’t you trying to find their intriguing whereabouts instead of making peevish comments with neither head nor tail?
Even if the Saint wasn’t directly involved in the repetitive building project, there is a coherent intention to mark through visual symbols and sensitive location his contribution to the Domnița Balaşa church’s fame and hail. To make a long story short, the Holy Gregory is today the object of a formidable cult. He converted from a doctrine scholar and analyst into an inestimable operative helper. Thousands of people rely on 
him for health preservation, spiritual matters, and decent income issues and approach him either individually during the opening hours or in a mighty, adoring crowd, experiencing both ecstasies and rapture, when the reliquary is moving into the open during important holidays for a short trot around the church. I like that. What I do not like and found incorrect is the mention of “Belonging of the Domnița Balaşa church” engraved on the reliquary’s cover which could be seen as an unjustified warning for still innocent potential thieves. The pleasure of the surprising discovery, so close to my home, of such a rich cultural, historic, romantic, artistic, decorative, and ritualistic compound peaked when I came to grips with the quality, the complexity, and the subtle setting of the statuary.
As soon as people enter the shrine’s plot, both garden and very active ritual court, they will feel attracted, dragged, and even welcomed, indifferently, be they righteous or sinners, by a standing statue on a high pedestal of a beautiful young woman made to look like a princess. It was exactly what the artist intended to do and what he was hired for. However, here, the artist was after something more. Instead of contenting himself with a generic image of how a princess could look (especially if fate is nice to her), he attempted to do a stone portrait. That is fine and daring, but the princess was in a better world without leaving behind any visual records for more than a hundred years when the artist received the commission. Never mind that, thought the artist to himself, and instead of striving for a naturalist rendering from features that he didn’t know, he brought to life a conceptual portrait of character emanating
seriousness, modesty, determination, dignity, and pride. A lot of pride of course and for some good reason. The document the princess holds deliberately and shows contains the list of properties she sold to sponsor her religious and social endeavors. Could the sculptor Karl Strock, a German import and the founder father of the Romanian school of sculpture, have been a follower of the Swiss scholar Lavater advocating the embodiment, nolens volens, of character features per se in physiognomy? I do not know as I do not know for sure if Karl created only the model of the Princess Balaşa sculpture while the carving was performed with gusto by his son, Carol Storck who carved the personified virtues, we have already seen, at the Palace of Justice. The third Carol involved in the creation of this assertive eventually apotropaic monument was nobody else than the sponsor, King Carol I, a great art lover, and consummate amateur artist. Informally, and only between friends, we can call this magnetic artwork, The Three Carols monument.
The legibility of the artwork is impressive. I am quite sure that everybody would recognize the character’s features, which are so clearly represented that they seem “cast” in stone. A detail among dozens instantiating the artist’s commitment to a highly efficient language thrilled me. The princess’ ankle-long coat is bordered by a finely carved fur band. The fur band made out of the poor ermines’ superb natural coats was used to decorate royal dress by excellence and it marks the status of the bearer no less than a crown or diadem. So we know who is the beautiful gal even before reading on the pedestal that she is (again) the daughter of Constantin Brȃncoveanu only!!!
Can we conclude that this statue echoes the saying: “the right man in the right place”? The answer is both no and yes. Historically, the statue was ordered and used to hail the princess’s charity work. It was placed in front of the nearby shelter for old people. When the shelter became unsafe and was demolished, the sculpture was brought to the actual location and flourished. Fate and the natural catastrophes have brought the statue to the emplacement that it deserved to become the prow figure of an outstanding chapter of the Brȃncoveanu family saga. It conspicuously contributed to asserting the church’s function and identity and encouraged the visitors to step inside.
There, in the middle of the southern wall, he/she will meet Princess Balaşa again, more exactly her funerary monument. The monument is composed of three distinct parts: a three-stepped pedestal, a ceremonial coffin with an angel on the lid, and a woman figure seated on the middle step with one elbow on the top step and with naked feet on the lower one. I am not going to analyze it. It is too complex and I do not know if is carved from one bloc or many, if the coffin is functional or symbolic, and what could be the forms or the images that inspired the artist. I wonder if the fleshy, strikingly naturalist depiction of the princess’ toes isn’t indebted to Michelangelo’s Sybilis. That is all! The work is so well-rounded and convincing that it doesn’t need a pedigree. The amazing harmony of the figure’s body parts, legs, arms, head, and back, which are pointing in all directions like the blades of a windmill while concomitantly emphasizing the organic monumentality of the whole fascinated me. The still-young woman seems plunged in remembrances, reflections, and dreams. Loaded with feelings, and tormented by non-answered questions, the character didn’t leave her story behind. Ion Georgescu, Karl Storck’s foremost pupil, had the skill to pour soul into matter, to express emotion in shape and raise it on the surface.
I felt already exhausted of too much splendor, too much drama, too many saints and sinners, too much art and artifacts, too intense rituals in and out the edifice, too many builders and too many founders of a barrack that every fifty years is falling but I couldn’t leave without paying my respects to the Queen of the House. To my great surprise, I heard myself whispering, without thinking twice, in French: “Mais où es-tu à la fin? Es-tu au Paradis?”[1] For an infinitesimal instant, it seemed that the statue, who had raised and turned towards me its heavy stony head, let filter through the lids a glance of infinite sadness and whispered back: “Non, je ne suis pas au Paradis, je suis enfermée, prisonnière pour l’éternité dans ce maudit monument funéraire”[2]. The little reserve of sanity I generally keep in my brain bank got blank for a while. I was scared out of my wits if any but I have to avow that It didn’t shock me to hear about the princess’ abode. Long ago, I began to suspect that the souls of famous people got trapped within their respective funerary monuments, especially the artistically excellent ones. Evidence indicates that it is quite impossible to create a relevant, aesthetically sound funerary monument without locking inside the soul of the departed. It may sound dreadful, but that is life. There are even worse cases. Fritz Leiber already wrote a fine short story about a man whose soul got entangled in a pinball machine after viciously boasting during the game. Bill Murray, who everybody knows, was trapped in a time loop during his inept reportage on the ridiculous Hedgehog Day. There are endless examples. People should specify in their wills that “I do not want any funerary monument” and blast off. In conclusion, great sensuous artwork, in an harmonious stone lyric mode, but as composition matters, it sucks. The divorce between the two main characters is total. This apprentice winged alien, stunned with herbs up to his gills, caring for nothing, ignoring his ward, and lost into the clouds isn’t heart-breaking? Left her behind as an epitome of sadness? 
And I felt deeply outraged when I began to grasp the grave moral cum justice twists in the handling of the departed future. If a truly holy person like Princess Balaşa isn’t admitted to Paradise, who the hell is the Principal bringing in? Immigrants?
Dejected and clueless, I crossed the nave to come to grips with Zoe Brȃncoveanu’s, you already guessed funerary monument. It was clear that it would not be a piece of cake. I will try to make things simple and snappy. Zoe, the last living Brȃncoveanu, a child of another famous nobiliary family (no more names), got adopted by the last male descendant of the Brȃncoveanu, Grigore, and his wife, Safta, the uncontested number one Romanian philanthropist of all times. Safta, the founder of Domnita Balaşa church no.3 distributed, when already a widow, all her huge fortune to various charities and became a nun for the last 17 years of her life. So, I do not want to hear that all the rich are greedy and stingy. Some are and some are not, like the poor, but it is preferable to have some change in the pocket if you want to share… Zoe wedded the ruling prince Gheorghe Bibescu, brings into the marriage the huge Brȃncoveanu fortune (reconstituted, God only knows how), gives to her husband some four or five children, loses her mind, and gets repudiated after a huge scandal process that has seen Bibescu unable to get the agreement from the Romanian Orthodox Church headed then by a Metropolitan with balls (!). So, again not all clerics, high hierarchy, or everyday servants, are corrupted. Some are and some are not. Never mind, deeply in love the father of four or five will marry a mother of three or four with whom he will have a new child. Fantastic people, Americana in the Balkans. The second Gheorghe’s wife is nobody else than Maritica Vacarescu,[3] the uppermost smashing nobiliary pinup of her time. Let’s face it, educated people and power brokers love beauty. It is no wonder that Zoe Brȃncoveanu, carved in Carrara marble by the then-successful French sculptor Jules Roulleau after a half-century run 
(she passed away in 1892, at 86) in a disallowed spouse role does not look particularly happy. No, her soul isn’t kept captive in the expensive marble block. I couldn’t decide if the somehow distraught angel was guiding a soul or loading a corpse into the upperworlds. The two main characters of the statuary group, Angel and Zoe, even seem a little clueless about what is expected of them to do next, they stick together. The third and fourth secondary characters, a woman taking care of a child while seated at the right corner of the pedestal lower step, do not seem to suffer from existential problems, but nobody knows who they are and why they are there. However, I am eager to mention that despite a few unpleasant shortcomings are flashing in this sculpture some exceptional plastic sentences created to subtly express in stone the feelings and the decisions of a human being while facing death: immediately before, during, and instants after the encounter. I will call this the little continuous time of the vanishing. Suppose you compare the rich, delicately textured, finely decorated robe, sensuously wrapped around Balasa princess’ strong body whose form is emphasized even more by an imposing tasseled belt with Zoe princess’ vestimentary ebb. Balasa’s dismay is finely suggested by her gaze, the bent neck, and the bare feet while the distraught and humiliated Zoe is fighting to strip herself naked after throwing away the royalty mantel. This emphatic act personifies the religious statement of detachment from earth’s rules and suggests ascension towards a new and different reality.
The related composition of the two monuments uttering in a similar pyramidal shape an upward thrust (more evident in Zoe’s group) through a three-level key (pedestal, coffin, angel) indicates the strengths of the standard pattern of the XIX c. funerary monument. To the sky, we go! At odds with dirigisme, artists may introduce contradictory features that augment general entropy and personal confusion in their creation. The undeniable Roulleau’s propensity to emphasize the nipples of his (of course) female representations may be an iconic example. For sure, it is a poetic license. I will say, Zoe was 86 years old at the time of her demise, mind you. Thank God he didn’t have to create a stark realist socialist-style character. Was Roulleau influenced by Germain Pilon’s master representation of the bare-breasted Catherine de Medici (achieved under the tight surveillance of the queen herself, of course, alive at the moment), and aiming to symbolize, through nakedness, the renouncement to earthly goods and the arrival in a better world? Or was he at core 
a staunch admirer of the feminine naked body eager to insert it in his bold compositions whatever would be the subject? I hope that history will bring an accurate, decent answer to this crucial quandary. Also, I do not doubt that the future will sooner than later raise on pinnacle the excellence of the sculptural setting at Domnița Balaşa church that brings the shrine miles beyond its elitist function into an unforgettable aesthetic experience for everybody. By the way, forget the wedding cake, I retract!
[1] But where are you? Are you in Paradise? [2] No, I am not in Paradise. I am trapped, a prisoner for eternity, within this cursed funerary monument! [3] For those who love genealogies and strange coincidences, Maritica is the direct descendant of Ienache Vacarescu, Constantin Brȃncoveanu’s adviser and friend who accompanied him into death at the gruesome Constantinople execution in 1714.
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