ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the significance of the seemingly imitative artifacts becomes more relevant to wider art historical concerns when the pieces are considered not merely on their own, or even within a larger context of regional culture, but rather as part of a greater infrastructure of cultural entanglement, which transcends regions and states. It suggests that foregrounding random connections, fault lines, and unexpected mutations, instead of pandering to the notions of cultural distinctiveness and clearly-defined origins, can productively introduce the geographically peripheral milieu into mainstream art historical narratives. The chapter reviews the most worthwhile previous attempts to reevaluate the status of Polish–Lithuanian art in art history, and then focuses on how we might rethink this milieu as an active agent of cultural entanglement, and a catalyst for disintegrating discourses that frame its geographical peripherality as a cultural marginality, and thus the domain of artistic imitation.
