Sacral Folk Woodcarving in today’s Slovakia was at the height of their popularity during the 18th and 19th centuries. Wooden sculptures played an important role in the life of people through their belief in their magical-symbolic function. Štefan Siváň the elder (1906-1995) also based his work on traditional folk carving, but the authenticity of his artistic expression set him apart from the anonymity of this artistic discipline. Siváň‘s artistic beginnings are linked to the carving of figures for mobile nativity scenes, which, in his youth, he took with him when he went carolling in Slovakia, Moravia and Silesia over the Christmas and New Year period. Otherwise, he spent his whole life in the Upper Moravian village of Babín, where he gradually created an extensive body of carving works, diverse in both subject and expression. Siváň was a peasant and a wheelwright, as a child he was already working with wood. In addition to motifs associated with Orava folk tradition, he depicted religious, especially Christological and Marian scenes.
The Madonna, a popular depiction of the Virgin Mary with Jesus in her arms, which naturally was reflected in folk art during the Baroque period as part of the catholicisation and spreading of the Marian cult, appears in Štefan Siváň’s work in several variants. Two of them are the template for the pictorial motifs on the FDC. Iconographic types of the Madonna from folk carvings imitated the miraculous statuettes of the Virgin Mary from various Austro-Hungarian pilgrimage sites. Siváň approached the subjects freely, with elementary morphology and a naive understanding of anatomy. In the Madonna sculptures, the sacral scene is intertwined with the family group – it expresses the loving relationship between mother and child. Siváň also infused a feeling of familial happiness into the depiction of the Holy Family on the stamp. The naïve form of the sculpture of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and Baby Jesus, holding the ruler‘s apple in his hand, does not diminish its spiritual message, on the contrary, its expressiveness underlines the sincere faith of its creator. All three works are held in the Orava Gallery collection in Dolný Kubín.
Dagmar Adamusová
