The Issue of Cretan or Serbian Models in the Depiction of the Individual Punishments in the Medieval Churches of Leșnic and Ribița: Once Again About the First Edogenous Testimony of the Romanian Language

The paper discusses the depictions of sinners representing individual punishments in two cycles of the Last Judgement from the late-medieval Eastern-rite churches of Leșnic and Ribița (southwestern Transylvania, Romania, fourteenth–fifteenth centuries), as well as the use of vernacular words in an inscription that accompanies one of the characters. Similar representations can be found in the Cretan cycles of the damned from the same timeframe, but the terms of comparison could be extended to Serbian churches, too. Western influences can also be detected, particularly in light of earlier cycles of the damned depicted in the Church of Streisângeorgiu (same region, 1313-1314), and the imagery can be related to the texts later included in the Old Romanian miscellaneous manuscript known as Codex Sturdzanus (sixteenth–seventeenth centuries).