Head of the museum’s research and education department Vira Stetsko calls him “the Ukrainian Michelangelo,” and justifies this comparison thus: “Pinsel’s majestic and monumental baroque plastic calls to memory sculptures by that famous Italian Renaissance master: Pinsel’s works are as expressive and dynamic as Michelangelo’s.”
“He synthesized in his work the heritage of Italian Renaissance as well as that of Ukrainian Gothic masters. As emotional and Renaissance-influenced as his works are, Pinsel was still a purely Ukrainian phenomenon. One can not find such baroque plastic in some another European nation’s artists’ works,” Stetsko tells The Day.
Visitors to the museum got to see Pinsel’s sculptures for the first time in the 1980s. Major exhibition of the master’s works came to Ternopil as well as to Ivano-Frankivsk and Lviv in 2007, as that year had been proclaimed the year of the Ukrainian Baroque genius by authorities of these three regions. The genius’s works arrived again to the Ternopil museum in January 2012. However, this time the exhibition includes not only works by the master but also materials about him.
“Pinsel studies, including photographs and other documentary materials, are here in unprecedented numbers. For instance, materials about Pinsel’s work for St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv date back to 1906. The photographs show, for example, how the Assumption Latin parish church and other buildings looked when they were still decorated with sculptures by Pinsel. Another distinctive feature of this year’s Pinsel exhibition is the first ever showing of St. Tobias, Faith, Courage, and Wisdom sculptures to the general public, as they were kept before in the museum’s storage rooms and were available only to art historians,” the researcher says.
“Pinsel’s works are Ukrainian art’s gold reserve,” Stetsko concludes. This gold reserve will be exhibited at the Louvre in October 2012 through January 2013.
