| Abstract [eng] |
Juozapas Angrabaitis (1859–1935) was a book smuggler and an autodidact editor who worked at the print shop of Otto von Mauderode in Tilžė. At the same time, he sold religious pictures and became their largest supplier to Lithuania. In 1893, he published a business catalogue of devotional items, Suraszas abrozdelių arba katalogas visokių szventųjų paveikslėlių (A List of Pictures or a Catalogue of Pictures of Various Saints), which was the first Lithuanian bibliography of fine art and the only catalogue of religious pictures up until now. Importantly, the majority of the pictures he sold bore texts in Lithuanian: prayers, invocations, and the like.In von Mauderode’s print shop, Angrabaitis would print texts in Lithuanian on the pictures he had ordered from the producers in Paris or Bavaria. The pictures featured in the catalogue would reach Lithuania as contraband; they were classified as small Lithuanian publications, the book-smuggling objects that had been forbidden by the tsarist authorities and incurred fines. During the early period (1884–1893), about one-third of the pictures produced by Angrabaitis consisted of the images of the saints (142 are mentioned); among them, there were at least 29 pictures of St Joseph, of different layout and various sizes. The numbers of the pictures of other saints were considerably smaller: 17 of St Aloysius, 13 of St Anthony, 12 of St Anne, eight of Stanislaus Kostka, seven of St Francis, six of St Catherine of Siena and St John the Apostle each, and so on. The numbers are approximate because there are 53 positions in the catalogue under the general name of ‘patrons’ or ‘patronkos’: a batch of pictures of the saints whose names remain unknown. Patronship or an attribution to patrons was a criterion clearly emphasised in the catalogue and of central importance to the potentials buyers of the pictures. In popular piety, the relevance of the patrons, who were personal guardians and protectors against all sorts of misfortunes and diseases, was immense at the end of the nineteenth century Most of the above-mentioned individuals belonged to the ‘pantheon’ of the saints most popular at the end of the nineteenth century, but the frequency indicators slightly differ from the plots of Lithuanian folk sculpture of the same period. On the other hand, it was religious pictures that were predominantly used as prototypes of folk sculpture in terms of iconography and composition. To a larger extent, the pictures of the saints that Angrabaitis distributed before 1893 reflected not so much the trends of piety in Lithuania as the repertoire and decorative fashions set by Parisian and German lithographers and print shops. For example, the catalogue lists quite a number of the saints of Germanic lands that were not popular in Lithuania (such as St Ulrich, St Afra of Augsburg, St Notburga, St Rudolf, St Rupert, St Sturm, St Wolfsindis, St Werner of Oberwesel), but St Casimir, the patron of Lithuania, is absent. |
