Grigorescu, Felicia: Forme de artă în cimitire evreieşti din nord-vestul Romaniei (Satu Mare, 2013)
Glosar de termeni
Maramureş integrate themselves in a so-called Jewish continental platform that includes Galitia, Podolia, Bessarabia, Bukovina, Maramureş, Carpathian Ruthenia. The Jews of north Crisana belong to a central European platform that includes Moravia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Germany, Hungary and Transylvania. This approach by origin could also be tracked in the artistic heritage that they brought with them in tomb stone art. III.A. Typology analysis according to the form of the stone One of the main characteristics of the tomb stones from the Jewish cemeteries in the north-west of Romania is their constant pseudo-architectural shape. They present one or a group of several elements of architecture adapted to the size of the stone. There are also monuments whose shape only imitate the pseudo-architectural shapes and others are non-architectural. Trying to rigidly group them is an uneasy process due to the fact that the shapes are a mixture of inter-groups, presenting a great variety of associations of pseudo-architectural elements which generate the most unexpected formulas, this being another characteristic of the Jewish tomb stone, which determines the great diversity of shapes. Drawing up the classification has meant two stages: the first one in which the shapes were grouped according to certain criteria, but the research of some new sites brought surprise elements, the subsets would always change their places, with many inter-group changes. In the second stage, each subsequent research consolidated the final scheme, bringing more and more arguments favouring the proposed subdivisions. For a better classification of the shapes, the complexity of the scheme was simplified by focusing the generalisations. After the first group, "the frequency" we tried to obtain the coverage of the entire spectrum of shapes, then each of them finding a sensible direction in the complexity of the classification. Thus, from a very vague characteristic, the one mentioned above, by gradually adding other characteristics, each monument is contained on a certain level, up to the top of it. The actual funerary monument is organised in two main areas: the ornaments area, in the upper part and the epitaph area in the lower part of the stone. The separation of the areas can be the result of a decorative element or group of elements, or the decorative elements may simply not be present. There are monuments with rich decorations, the decoration area overlapping the text. 109
