A_Maniera_Greca_content_context_and_tra (1).pdf

STUDIES IN ICONOGRAPHY Volume 35 2014

Published under the auspices of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University by Medieval Institute Publications Western Michigan University Kalamazoo

A Maniera greca: Content, Context, and Transformation of a Term Anastasia Drandaki To the memory of Titos Papamastorakis In 2004 at the private view for the exhibition “Pilgrimage to Sinai” at the Benaki Museum, I had the privilege of showing the president of the Hellenic Republic, Kostis Stephanopoulos, a highly educated man and a lover of Byzantine art, around the exhibits.1 When setting up the exhibition, I had placed the striking icon of the Archangel Gabriel (Fig. 1) immediately after the large group of so-called “Crusader” icons, as a bridge to the group of Palaiologan paintings.2 Standing in front of the archangel, President Stephanopoulos eyed it keenly and exclaimed: “But that’s so Italian!” In other words, for President Stephanopoulos the Sinai angel stands apart from the corpus of Byzantine painting because its manner is not Greek. This perception of the icon on the part of a cultivated, twentyfirst-century Greek, well acquainted with Byzantine art, has set me thinking about a series of linked questions relating to the subject I am going to discuss. What are the factors that determine the identity of a work and act as criteria for classifying it as belonging to one tradition or another? Are these criteria the same in every period or for each kind of public, or do they change according to the individual consciousness and above all the political and religious intentions of the sponsor, viewers, and social context in which they operate? Using as a point of departure questions such as these, I wish to discuss in my paper two related yet distinct issues. In the first part I will address some aspects of the content and context of the maniera greca that emerge from its use in late medieval sources on the one hand and in modern art historical studies on the other. Then I will turn my focus on the reverse of the coin, so to speak, from West to East and discuss briefly painting ensembles that defy conventional labels, such as maniera greca, maniera latina, or Crusader art. Paintings that unlike famous controversial panels—the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas, for example3—offer solid information regarding their provenance and cultural context and may help us understand the ideological mechanisms and the historical necessities that urged patrons and artists alike to employ a mixed artistic language. The literal definition of “[in the] Greek manner”—internationally recognized in the Italian form, maniera greca—appears, at least initially, easily comprehensible. © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University

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Fig. 1. The Archangel Gabriel. Second half of the thirteenth century. Sinai, The Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Bruce White, reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

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The term suggests a group of iconographical and stylistic characteristics in a painted work (I am referring only to painting here) that are sufficient in the eyes of the viewer to classify the work in the medieval Greek—i.e., Byzantine—tradition of painting. This view usually comes from a subject situated outside the Byzantine sphere; in other words, it is a perception of Byzantine painting, or of some version of it, by a public that is looking at it as a foreign artistic product. At the same time, since the term’s first appearance in Renaissance literature, the use of it in a source, whether explicit or implicit, suggests a distinction is being made between this Byzantine/Greek painting and some other painting style against which it is measured, such as the “maniera latina” or the “maniera moderna” which Vasari praises.4 In any case, based on the above-mentioned premises, describing a work as a product of the “Greek style” does not assume that it came from Byzantium or that the artist who created it was Greek. It only assumes that the artist adopted those iconographical or stylistic features which sufficed to ascribe the work to that tradition in the eyes of the viewer. Moreover, this is hinted at by Vasari himself when he refers to the maniera greca. He is not so much interested in Greek painters but rather in the Italians, whose work classified them in—or subordinated them to—the Byzantine tradition of painting and whose obsolete artistic language he severely criticizes. The entirely negative approach to medieval Greek painting by Vasari (and other Italian commentators of the Renaissance) and the long shadow this has cast on the modern-day history of art has in the international literature of recent decades repeatedly been the subject of critical analysis and commentary.5 However, despite his critical approach, we still for the most part accept the content and geographical context Vasari assigned to the maniera greca (i.e., Byzantine-influenced art produced in Italy), and his periodization (i.e., the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries), even when the validity and adequacy of the term itself is challenged or when the term is enclosed in quotation marks as a terminus technicus.6 Tellingly, in the glossary contained in the catalog of the exhibition Byzantium Faith and Power (1261–1557), edited by Helen Evans, the term is defined as: “maniera greca (Ital. ‘Greek Style’): term often used derogatorily to describe the Byzantine-influenced style of much thirteenth-century Italian painting” (Fig. 2).7 This definition—though simplified, as is only to be expected in the glossary of an exhibition catalog—nevertheless fundamentally differs little from the way the term is used in scholarly writing. For example, in her excellent book Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy Anne Derbes notes at the beginning of the first chapter under the telling subtitle “Byzantine Questions,” “Thirteenth-century Italian painting has traditionally been labelled the ‘maniera greca’ (a disparaging term from the beginning) and its style described as ‘Italo-Byzantine’; these terms are still used today. . . . But labels like maniera greca and ‘Italo-Byzantine’ mask as much as they reveal.”8

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Fig. 2. Berlinghiero, Madonna and Child. Ca. 1230. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Irma N. Straus, 1960 (60.173). (Photo: Schecter Lee; Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

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If it is taken for granted in the greater part of the literature nowadays that the Italo-Byzantine painting of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century constitutes the content of the maniera greca, paradoxically, the term also appears with equally well-defined but not identical content in another body of contemporary writings which deal with the painting of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century icons. In this case the term is used in respect of icons made outside Italy, specifically in workshops in the urban centers of Venetian Crete, however, many of these icons were destined for an Italian or other Western European clientele (Figs. 3–4).9 We are no longer dealing with works in a mixed Italo-Byzantine style, but icons which both iconographically and stylistically remain true to the traditional Byzantine manner. The use of the descriptive term “alla greca” for these icons is by no means arbitrary. The term appears in fifteenth-century contracts commissioning icons that are now kept in the archives of the Stato di Venezia.10 In these sources the icons “in forma greca” are distinguished from the icons “a la latina”: works made in a Western style which did not, however, correspond to contemporary trends in Italian painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but assiduously repeated a limited number of venerable Late Gothic models.11 These stylistically conservative icons alla latina were also addressed, for the most part, to a Western European clientele, as attested by surviving contracts between Cretan painters and merchants who, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries channeled their paintings to the European market.12 These two different uses of the Greek manner seem unconnected. The modern literature relating to thirteenth-century Byzantine-influenced painting in Italy seems to know nothing of the progeny of this art. Paradoxically, the literature on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Cretan icons also throws little light on the subject, and I say “paradoxically” because one might expect the past and roots of an artistic phenomenon to be explored, if not its later development.13 One could come up with many reasons for this particular scholarly entrenchment. Students of the two “Greek manners” come from different academic disciplines, each of which has its own ideological and methodological baggage. The two parties rarely meet, even at academic conferences.14 But over and above whatever reasons dictate or undermine our own personal academic approach, the question remains: does the application of the term “Greek manner” for the artistic endeavour of the two periods—the thirteenth century on the one hand and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the other—describe two distinct artistic phenomena going under the same name, or, related, consecutive manifestations of the same phenomenon, which then obliges us to examine the term in a wider time frame and geographical context? This is something of a rhetorical question. The demand for works in the Greek style outside the boundaries of the Byzantine world did not, of course, stop with Giotto and Duccio. Despite the explosive flourishing of the Italian Renaissance, a high proportion of the icons painted in the fifteenth-century Cretan

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Fig. 3. Cretan workshop, the Virgin Galaktotrofoussa (Lactans). Mid-fifteenth century. Benaki Museum, inv. no. 36312. Gift of Anna Papadaki. (Photo: Giorgos Fafalis; © 2014 by Benaki Museum Athens.)

workshops were intended to be delivered directly to Italy and Flanders, as we learn from the Venetian archives. The icons corresponded to the religious needs, devotional practices, and ideological orientation of part of the Catholic community, which certainly did not look on them as modern artistic creations but as venerable and authentic sacred works, hallmarked by the traditional Greek style in which the holy personages were depicted.15 Surviving contracts reveal what amounts to mass production of icons in Candia, with orders for hundreds of works with predetermined dimensions, shape, iconography, and even color palette.16 Confirmation of the continued demand in Italy for icons in the Greek manner comes from Italian authors, who as defenders of modern Italian painting rail

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Fig. 4. Cretan workshop, the Virgin Galaktotrofoussa (Lactans). Second half of the fifteenth century. Benaki Museum, inv. no. 27876. (Photo: Giorgos Fafalis; © 2014 Benaki Museum Athens.)

against the continuing presence of old-fashioned icons in the devotional practices of the faithful in Italy. At the end of the sixteenth century Giovanni Battista Armenini notes with evident distaste that he has been in many great houses and homes all over Italy, “And I have seen that they all boasted admirable works of art, except for paintings of sacred images, which were mostly small pictures of some figures made in the Greek manner, very awkward, displeasing and covered with soot. They seemed to have been displayed for every reason except to inspire devotion or to adorn such places.”17 In his dismissive phrasing, Armenini, himself a painter and an art theorist, explicitly mentions the reason the icons “alla greca” continued to be in demand: “a muover divozione.” Klaus Krüger has rightly noticed the connection between Armenini’s comment and the preaching of the Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici, who almost two hundred years earlier, in the early fifteenth century, advised parents to urge their children to pray before old, smoke-covered icons, not modern, highly ornamented paintings.18 In fact, Armenini’s words can be read as a direct answer to monastic circles that promoted the use of traditional icons. In their preaching we find one of the reasons that allowed for the continuous

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demand for icons in the Greek manner, long after Byzantium’s dominating impact on the artistic developments of the West had come to an end. Dominici’s preaching, on the other hand, is interesting in this context for yet another reason, because he advocates the presence of icons in every room of the house, especially images of the Virgin and Child, a subject that enjoyed huge popularity among the clientele of Cretan workshops.19 A confirmation of Dominici’s views, as regards the omnipresence of icons in residences of laymen in late medieval Italy, comes from the inventory of the estate of the Siennese philosopher and doctor Bartalo di Tura Bandini (written in 1484), among whose possessions were numerous small icons for private devotion.20 Although Victor Schmidt analyzes the contents of the inventory with respect to Siennese painting of the time—and there is absolutely no reason to question his approach—it is worth noting that Cretan workshops of the same period painted icons and small devotional triptychs with the same subject matter as the ones that adorned the house of Bartalo. And it was not just the mass-produced icons that were being channeled into the European market to cover the demands of a public with religious fervor but no individual artistic requirements. We know of commissions for works in a mixed, Italo-Byzantine style, which were intended for public worship, from patrons with financial potential and high artistic expectations. One of the most interesting cases is a monumental polyptych from Apulia, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromilides has studied and correctly attributed to an early fifteenth-century Cretan workshop (Fig. 5).21 The polyptych, intended for the altar of a Catholic church, was made for the Monastery of San Stephano, near Monopoli in Apulia, which at the time belonged to the Hospitallers of Rhodes.22 The individual figures in the altarpiece each proclaim their own unadulterated iconographical and stylistic origins, though the Byzantine element predominates. The central figures of the enthroned Virgin and Child, and another four figures are pure Byzantine: SS. John the Baptist, Nicholas, Sebastian, and Christopher. The other two saints follow late Gothic models, in the manner in which they were mostly depicted in works by fourteenth-century Venetian artists.23 As regards St. Augustine, we can reasonably assume that he is depicted in Western fashion because as a saint of the Catholic Church he was not found in the Byzantine iconographic tradition. Apparently the representation of this saint on the Apulian polyptych was drawn from the standard repertoire of Cretan workshops, since he is depicted with almost identical facial characteristics, posture, and style on another, slightly later Cretan panel of the mid-fifteenth century, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.24 It is noteworthy that according to the sources at least one devotional image of St. Augustine was on public display in Candia, in the majestic church of San Salvatore of the Augustinians.25 And despite the fact that scarcely anything by way of painting has been preserved in Cretan towns, we may

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Fig. 5. Cretan workshop, Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS. Christopher, Augustine, Stephen, John the Baptist, Nicholas, and Sebastian. Early fifteenth century. From Apulia, Monopoli, San Stefano. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Dr. Eliot Hubbart, inv. no. 37.410. (Photo: © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

fairly securely assume that devotional panels, wall paintings, and altarpieces from major churches in the urban centers of the island would undoubtedly have served as models for the numerous commissions undertaken by Cretan painters.26 In the case of St. Stephen, who was equally popular in Byzantium and in Western Europe, choosing the late Gothic style for his portrait on the Apulian altarpiece was undoubtedly a conscious choice on the part of the patron, who preferred for the figure of the dedicatory saint of the church a version more familiar to the Catholic community of the monastery.27 In the early fifteenth century the Hospitallers commissioned what was by Italian standards a precious Byzantine devotional work that gave prominence to the order’s strong ties with the East, from where all the wonder-working devotional icons came. However, the Hospitallers retained the Catholic character of the altarpiece by including St. Augustine in the program and choosing for St. Stephen a late Gothic form of depiction. In the case of this polyptych the deliberate artistic “bilingualism,” in depicting the figures, in order to emphasize at the same time the Eastern provenance and the Western destination of the monumental composition, is particularly striking and equally eloquent.

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A completely different but equally interesting case as regards the ways of implementing and the motives for using the maniera greca in the fifteenth century is represented by the well-known Madonna of Cambrai, from the eponymous cathedral (Fig. 6). The history and the importance of this icon are well known and have been comprehensively studied by Jean Wilson and Maryan Ainsworth, among others.28 An Italo-Byzantine Virgin of Tenderness of the mid-fourteenth century, a work which most likely no Byzantine of the period would have recognized as a Greek icon, was bought in Rome a century later and transferred to the cathedral of Cambrai, where it was received and promoted as a genuine Byzantine work and indeed an original creation attributed to the hand of the evangelist Luke.29 Jean Wilson has convincingly explained the political motives behind the exploitation of the icon as a wonder-working Byzantine archetype, in the context of the efforts of Duke Phillip the Good to promote a crusade to liberate the Byzantines from the Ottomans. The story of Philip’s nephew, the count of Estampes, commissioning copies of the icon from Hayne of Brussels and Petrus Christus is very well known, so there is no need for me to go into any details here.30 What is interesting to note in the context of this discussion is that in the mid-fifteenth century in Burgundy the iconographic type, the gold ground, and the icon’s provenance in Rome, no longer directly from the East, were enough to guarantee the Byzantine pedigree of the work in the minds of the congregation and to give it the status of a relic and symbol of the conquered Byzantium. From the evidence presented so far, the time frame within which we can— or should—examine the historical phenomenon of the maniera greca seems to far exceed its normally allotted span, which pronounces it clinically dead in the early fourteenth century, with the emergence of the radical new tendencies in Italian painting. The art theorists of the Renaissance used the term maniera greca to describe an art historical phenomenon of the past, a stage in the history of Italian art marked by the influence of Byzantine painting, from which they wished to distance themselves and the spectacular artistic achievements of their time.31 But it goes without saying that the rapid pace in certain circumstances at which the avant-garde in art evolves and is transformed by no means implies the simultaneous elimination of earlier tendencies and styles, because basically the needs which these earlier characteristics met and the social dynamics which were expressed in their reproduction still existed. In our case it seems that it was the preaching of certain monastic circles that played a decisive role in the continuous demand for Byzantine or Byzantinizing icons in Italy, as testified by the preaching of Dominici and the complaints by Armenini, mentioned above.32 The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 added another reason, political this time, for the renewal of interest in Greek icons. The Virgin of Cambrai is just one illustrious example, but it is worth remembering that the mass commissions to Cretan workshops for icons

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Fig. 6. The Cambrai Madonna (Notre-Dame de Grâce). ca. 1340. France, Cathedral of Cambrai. (Photo: Restored Traditions.)

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in the Greek manner reached their peak in the second half of the fifteenth century. I have argued in the past that the flow of Cretan icons to Italy precisely during that period can be understood in this political climate that amplified the respect for and veneration of Byzantine culture in general and icons in particular.33 By bringing into the discussion of the content and context of the term maniera greca the evidence from this later period—that is, the testimony of the Cretan icons, on the one hand, and the modes of ideological exploitation of Byzantine or Byzantinizing icons in the West, on the other—the disparaging approach of Renaissance art historians like Armenini and Vasari may take on an added layer of meaning. It is tempting to see their negative assessment of the Greek manner not only as an unfavorable evaluation of an artistic trend of the past, surpassed and forgotten under the triumph of the Renaissance, but also as an expression of disdain towards a persisting predilection for old-fashioned icons, a predilection that according to the evidence from the Cretan icons still affected a significant proportion of the art market, even in this late period. So far, I have discussed aspects of the term maniera greca that depart from the common time frame of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, but I have remained focused on its traditional geographical area, Italy, and with the example of Cambrai, in Burgundy/Flanders. Most of the examples I discussed can indeed be described as Italo-Byzantine, the style traditionally related to the maniera greca. I referred to paintings that demonstrate different modes of appropriation of Byzantine elements, the Cambrai Madonna and the San Stefano altarpiece, commissioned or used by Western clients to answer their devotional needs and serve their political and ideological agendas. It is precisely the needs and purposes of those clients that make the eclectic artistic physiognomy of such paintings meaningful.34 This approach applies of course not only to works created for or used by Latins in Western Europe but also to paintings of an equally mixed, multifarious style made for the multinational and doctrinally diverse population in the East. The two phenomena, the so-called maniera greca and hybrid works created in the East, have been interpreted by many scholars in the past decades as interrelated artistic expressions of the encounter between Byzantium and the West,35 an encounter that acquired new dynamics and ideological orientations after the Fourth Crusade. However, with respect to the icons, despite the rich material at hand and the equally rich and diverse approaches in the literature, we still struggle to classify them and to understand the mechanisms that control their multiple variations. Our bafflement is all the more in evidence when we try to categorize panels for which we have no real indication of provenance, use, maker, or patron—which, unfortunately, is quite often the case. The problem is amply demonstrated by the bibliographical history of the famous panels in the National Gallery of Washington, DC, the Kahn and the Mellon Madonnas, with its series of attributions to painters and

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artistic centers and the different labels under which the panels appear. Preeminent scholars like Bernard Berenson, Victor Lazarev, Hans Belting, Jaroslav Folda, and Rebecca Corrie have contributed to a rich, ongoing debate on these captivating paintings.36 Launched one after another, maniera greca, Crusader art, lingua franca, and maniera cypria are all terms whose legitimacy then comes to be doubted and their adequacy to define such a fluid, multifarious artistic content questioned.37 To paraphrase Anthony Cutler, as long as we are unable to identify whose “needs and interests” such works answered, the full interpretation of their character will continue to elude us.38 In the second part of my paper I will shift my focus from West to East and contribute to this debate by briefly discussing two painted compositions that defy established art historical labels. The paintings betray different modes of appropriation and amalgamation of Italian and Byzantine elements, and at the same time offer us solid information regarding the environment in which they were made and the audience they addressed. The first example comes from the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai. The angel, which so impressed the President of the Hellenic Republic, comes from a Deesis composition from which Gabriel’s companion, the Archangel Michael, and the two chief apostles, Peter and Paul, also survive39 (Fig. 7). The two apostles have been published by Kurt Weitzmann, who described them as a “master set” because he believed that they were the models for a series of copies in the monastery.40 But I think otherwise. These Deesis icons are monumental panels (Michael: 105 x 75 cm; Gabriel: 104.5 x 70 cm; Peter: 105.7 x 71.1 cm; Paul: 104.3 x 69.8 cm). There is no doubt that they all come from one composition, since not only the dimensions and the stylistic details but also the decoration on the reverse are identical on all four works.41 These four Deesis icons were exhibited as a group in Byzantium 330–1453 in the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008–9.42 In his entry for the exhibition catalog Robin Cormack tentatively adds to the group of the four Deesis icons a sanctuary door with the Annunciation, suggesting they could all come from the same iconostasis.43 This appealing hypothesis remains open, until a systematic examination of all five works can be conducted. From my brief study of the sanctuary door, I formed the opinion that though close in style and iconography, it does not share the meticulous, calligraphic workmanship of the four Deesis panels. As for certain shared iconographic details, like the angels’ hairbands with the large pearl-studded ruby in the middle, they do not offer conclusive evidence of a planned grouping, as these commonly held details appear frequently on thirteenth-century angelic representations in Sinai44 (Fig. 9). Therefore, in the context of this discussion I will remain focused solely on the Deesis icons. This Deesis, as I have maintained before, copies an earlier, smaller one at the monastery, nowadays in a very poor state of preservation but from which the

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Fig. 7a–d. Deesis with the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, and the apostles Peter and Paul. Byzantine, second half of the thirteenth century. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Spyros Panayiotopoulos (a–c) and Bruce White (d); reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

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figures of Gabriel, Peter, and Paul survive (Fig. 8).45 Despite extensive damage to all three figures, it is still possible to discern the exceptional quality of the painting. Late Comnenian reminiscences are still strong in the rendering of the figures, but the fleshy faces, soft painterly modeling, and intensely humane introspection of the expressions link them with the most outstanding Byzantine monuments of the first half of the thirteenth century, such as the wall paintings in Mileševa (1222–28).46 The later, monumental Deesis that concerns us here copies the iconography of the earlier composition down to the last detail, but despite the faithful copying, the new icons are characterized by a meticulous calligraphic quality and cannot avoid the academic line which distinguishes them from the contemplative feel of their models (Fig. 9). The talented painter of the later Deesis also reveals a different approach to the rendering of volume, displayed in the manner of painting certain details—as, for example, the ends of the angels’ headbands, where the transparent, ethereal modeling of the earlier work has been replaced by successive shades of compact color. The modeling of the faces and the corporeality of the figures in the monumental ensemble has close parallels in “official” Byzantine works of the second half of the thirteenth century—as, for example, in a wall painting in the Vatopedi Monastery with the enthroned Virgin between angels, dated in the last quarter of the thirteenth century (Fig. 10)47; and the Deesis mosaic in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (1261), a work whose links with contemporary Italian painting have been put forth.48 However, in the four Sinai panels the familiarity with Western art, particularly with the pictorial vocabulary amalgamated in Crusader lands, is even more pronounced. Innovative for Byzantine painting is the use of the chiaroscuro in the rendering of the angels’ hands; another innovation is seen in the halos of Peter and Paul, no longer the burnished reflective gold discs of the earlier work but instead adorned with incised diaper motifs and punched dots, a decoration of Western European origin, adopted by workshops in the Latin East.49 The same technique occurs on other hybrid thirteenth-century icons created in Crusader lands, like the central panel of a triptych with the Enthroned Virgin and Child in Sinai,50 and the vita icon of St. Prokopios in the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.51 Even more telling for the character of the Deesis ensemble is the use of certain painterly means that though not unknown to Byzantine painting, are among the distinctive characteristics of a group of panels attributed to workshops active in Crusader Acre. The meticulous calligraphy of the angels’ hair, the pronounced use of a vivid red line to highlight the upper lids of the eyes, and the intense delineation of human anatomy and wrinkles (particularly evident in the portraits of Peter and Paul) are all features that betray close familiarity with the artistic vocabulary employed in panels like the double-sided icon with the Crucifixion and the Anastasis and the diptych with the Virgin Kykotissa and St. Prokopios, both in Sinai and attributed to the same Acre workshop (Fig. 11).52 On the other hand, the design and

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Fig. 8a–c. Deesis with the apostles Peter and Paul, and the Archangel Gabriel. Byzantine, second quarter of the thirteenth century. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Spyros Panayiotopoulos; reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

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Fig 9a. The Archangel Gabriel from a Deesis (detail from Fig. 8). Byzantine, second quarter of the thirteenth century. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Spyros Panayiotopoulos; reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

Fig 9b. The Archangel Gabriel from a Deesis (detail from Fig. 7). Byzantine, second half of the thirteenth century. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Bruce White; reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

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Fig. 10. The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels. Wall painting, last quarter of the thirteenth century. Mount Athos, Vatopedi Monastery. (Photo: From Efthymios N. Tsigaridas, “The Mosaics and the Byzantine Wall-Paintings,” in The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, vol. 1 (Mount Athos: Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1998), 234–35, fig. 193, reproduced by permission of the Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopedi.)

technical execution of the profuse chrysography on the angels’ garments find their closest parallels in other hybrid paintings—for example, a Crucifixion in Sinai related to Tuscan painting, and, above all, the Kahn Madonna in Washington, DC (Fig. 12)— works that share an equally discreet combination of Italian and Byzantine elements as the monumental Sinai Deesis.53 But unlike these works, we know where the Sinai Deesis was produced and where it was used. As, in my opinion, the panels copy the earlier Deesis in the monastery, there can be no doubt that the panels were also created there, to be used in the monastery itself. Kurt Weitzmann believed that the Peter and Paul “master set” was part of the iconostasis in the Katholikon or of one of the side chapels.54 If they were intended for a templon, then their dimensions suggest the only likely place was the templon in the Katholikon. It should be noted that the four surviving icons from this Deesis are still arranged two by two on either side of the new templon, on the north and south walls of the Katholikon.55 Nevertheless I should point out that the templon was not the only place these icons could have been placed in the monastery. We must remember that St. Catherine’s was never decorated with wall paintings, which means it would have been possible to place the monastery’s numerous and iconographically various icons on the long, high walls and to move them around.

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Fig. 11a. The Crucifixion from a two-sided icon with the Anastasis on the back side. Saint-Jean d’Acre, ca. 1280. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Bruce White; reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

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Fig. 11b. The apostle Paul from a Deesis (detail from Fig. 7). Byzantine, second half of the thirteenth century. Sinai, the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine. (Photo: Spyros Panayiotopoulos; reproduced by permission of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.)

In any case we are evidently dealing with a monumental commission of an official nature, intended for the monastery’s Katholikon. The choice of an exceptional painter is consistent with the nature of the commission. His familiarity with Italian painting and the subtle integration of decorative motifs from the Western tradition, which had become fashionable in the East, is displayed in a coherent pictorial language. The high quality, the somewhat academic character, and the eclectic nature of the Deesis composition, which differ from other contemporary Crusader icons, pose questions as to the background and training of this talented artist. Among the several areas with which Sinai maintained close ties, I believe Constantinople is the more possible candidate. As mentioned before, the angels of the Deesis have affinities with the exquisite Deesis mosaic in the Hagia Sophia, while no comparable work can be securely located in other contemporary artistic

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Fig. 12. The Virgin and Child Enthroned. Byzantine, probably Constantinople, thirteenth century. The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Gift of Otto Kahn (1949.7.1). (Photo: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.)

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Fig. 13. St. Romanos the Horse Healer. Wall painting, Taxiarchs in Goritsa, Lakonia (Peloponnese). Second half of the thirteenth century. (Photo: Author.)

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centers, such as Cyprus. Furthermore, it is worth noting the presence in Constantinople of a forceful personality from Sinai, in the late thirteenth century, when the icons in question must have been produced. I am referring to the patriarch of Alexandria, Athanasios II, who was a Sinaite monk.56 He lived in Constantinople from 1276 and was a confidant of both Michael Palaiologos and his son Andronikos. Moving for decades among the imperial circles of the newly recovered Byzantine capital, Athanasios fits perfectly in the role of the mind behind the commission of the Sinai Deesis. Regardless of the validity of this hypothesis, the subtly mixed stylistic idiom of the Deesis is entirely suited to an Orthodox monastery like Sinai, which while keeping its dogmatic identity, had gained the protection of the Latin ecclesiastical authorities in the early thirteenth century and received an ever increasing flow of Latin pilgrims in the late thirteenth century.57 The second example I am going to use comes from the south of Greece, from the region of Lakonia, 20 km from Sparta, near the village Goritsa. Unfortunately, the monument is still unpublished, though its existence has been recorded in the Greek literature since 1978.58 The church, dedicated to the Taxiarchs (archangels), is cross vaulted, and the painted program has no hidden surprises.59 The iconography of the scenes includes certain peculiarities characteristic of thirteenth-century Lakonian painting, such as the detail of Christ Emmanuel in a fleece or cloud in the scene of the Annunciation.60 The program also contains saints with strong local cults, such as St. Romanos o Epi tin Sklepan ton Alogon, the horse curer, who specialized in treating animals, particularly horses (Fig. 13).61 The good quality of the execution of these wall paintings and the highly literate inscriptions reflect the variety of models at the disposal of the up-to-date workshop that decorated the church, models which prove surprisingly multifarious. Alongside the Byzantine figures of the full-length Mother and Child and the Pantocrator, which stand in for icons on the masonry templon, monumental figures of the dedicatory saints, the Taxiarchs Gabriel and Michael, are a source of some surprise (Fig. 14). Tellingly, from among the range of models at the disposal of this workshop, the patron selected the most Italianate solution for the church’s patron saints (Fig. 15). Not only was an Italian model rolled out for their depiction but use was also made of varying painting methods, which further distinguished the Taxiarchs from the other figures in the iconographic program, particularly in the green shades of the underpainting. Regarding the style of the wall paintings in Goritsa, it is also worth noting that the individuals the patron chose to honor above all—the Virgin and Child, the Pantocrator, the Taxiarchs, and the mounted St. George— are decorated with relief halos, a feature we have come to associate mostly with Cyprus and Syria-Palestine, but which have also been recorded in other Peloponnesian monuments of the second half of the thirteenth century, to which period the Taxiarchs’ church can also be dated.62 The plaster relief decoration on the halos in

62    Anastasia Drandaki

Fig. 14. The Synaxis of the archangels. Wall painting, Taxiarchs in Goritsa, Lakonia. Second half of the thirteenth century. (Photo: Author.)

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Fig. 15. The Synaxis of the archangels, detail of Archangel Michael. Wall painting, Taxiarchs in Goritsa, Lakonia. Second half of the thirteenth century. (Photo: Author.)

the Taxiarchs reproduces a variety of motifs, lozenges, and foliate scrolls, a combination that appears on the raised halos of the Ryerson Diptych, a work probably made in Acre.63 As regards an overall understanding of the decorative program, it is no coincidence that the chief apostles, Peter and Paul, are depicted opposite the Taxiarchs in an equally prominent location, while on the blind niche at the west end of the north wall an equestrian St. George is depicted on a monumental scale. The distribution of equestrian saints in the monuments of the Morea in the thirteenth century has been persuasively interpreted by Sharon Gerstel as evidence of the cultural identity shared by the two communities, Greeks and Franks, in the mixed society of the time.64 Next to the church entrance there is a full-length portrait of another military saint, Demetrios, patron saint of the newly established imperial dynasty of the Palaiologoi.65 Conspicuously, the new metropolitan church of Mystras, decorated immediately after the recapture of the Byzantine capital by Michael Palaiologos and the transfer of the local diocese from Sparta to Mystras (1262), was dedicated to the saint.66 The politico-religious undertones behind Demetrios’s representation in the church of Goritsa becomes more evident if one takes into

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consideration that the saint is seldom depicted in Lakonian churches before the time of Michael Palaiologos.67 Given that we are still awaiting publication of the wall paintings from this monument, all that I can comment on in this respect is the conscious use in a Lakonian monument with an impeccably Orthodox iconographical program, of that same multifarious artistic language that we so often assume developed to meet the needs of a Latin public, whether in Italy or in the Crusader East. But in this case there is nothing to support such a hypothesis. The church, despite the combination of models of diverse provenance, does not in any way betray doctrinal deviations or ambiguities. The precise reasons behind the particular choices made in its decoration will only become clear after the full publication of the monument. However, this albeit fragmentary presentation of the wall paintings raises new issues to be resolved about the clientele for and the distribution of a mixed “Italo-Byzantine” painting manner, issues not normally associated with the heart of Byzantine Greece and its Orthodox population. To sum up, in the first part of my paper I tried to test the chronological boundaries within which we recognize and can study the phenomenon described as the maniera greca. The sources themselves, as well as the extant works, oblige us to broaden the field of research beyond the traditional content of the term—i.e., the Byzantinizing painting of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italy. Catholic patrons continued to show interest in “genuine” Byzantine icon painting into the fifteenth century, whether to use it in their devotional practices or to serve politicoreligious strategies. This continuous demand for icons alla greca may no longer have affected artistic developments in Italy, with the exception of Venice, but it triggered the surprising flourishing of the icons industry in Venetian Crete. In the art historical literature, the maniera greca is associated with the “ItaloByzantine” style, an amalgamation of elements of Byzantine, Italian, and north European origin, combined in a pictorial language that answered the needs of Latin patrons in the West.68 The relation of maniera greca with art developed in the Crusader East is being recognized and explored in modern studies, but the focus in most approaches remains on Latin patrons and artists. In contrast, scholars like Doula Mouriki, Lucy-Ann Hunt and, more recently, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Mat Immerzeel, and Rebecca Corrie, have in their studies on the painting of the Crusader kingdoms highlighted a new and powerful component—the role of local artists: Cypriots and Syrians, as well as those from the local Christian communities of the Melchites and the Maronites, who made, commissioned, and received one category of these paintings.69 In the second part of my paper I argued that it was the Greek Orthodox who equally used the repertoire of various iconographical and stylistic solutions

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created by the clashes, rivalries, dialogue, and enforced coexistence with the Latins.70 Panels such as the Sinai Deesis demonstrate that compositions of mixed style could find a prominent place in the Katholikon of an Orthodox monastery. From a different angle, the discussion of this Deesis amply demonstrates the challenges inherent in the study of the icons treasured in Sinai:71 fragmentary compositions, works brought to the monastery at different times from different places of origin, and presents and offerings—but also some works that carry the stamp of local production. In my view, local creations are not distinguished by any particular technical trait—I do not think there ever was any such thing as an exclusively Sinaitic icon technique72—but because they copy older, highly venerated icons that already existed in the monastery. Lastly, I referred to an unknown monument, the Taxiarchs in Goritsa, Lakonia, because despite the little evidence we have, it adds a new piece to the rich puzzle of thirteenth-century painting. In churches like the Taxiarchs, I believe that the conscious matching of models of diverse cultural provenance is used in order to serve the religious policy of the commissioner. In this respect it is worth mentioning that Vassiliki Foskolou recently studied the dedicatory inscriptions of some monuments in southern Greece, whose expressions bespeak of the alignment of a section of the local archontes with the political ideology of Michael Palaiologos,73 the emperor whose pro-union policy became a burning issue for the Orthodox population.74 Seen from this point of view, the mixed, multifarious features of such monuments are transformed into a powerful message and are part of not only an ongoing dialogue with the community to which they were addressed but also with other monuments, which were serving similar or opposing strategies at that time. Notes A version of this paper was presented at the conference “Re-Defining Byzantium: Art and Thought in the Byzantine World,” at the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, October 14–15, 2011. I thank the director of the Index, Dr. Colum Hourihane, for inviting me to speak on that occasion. 1. The exhibition Pilgrimage to Sinai, Treasures from the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine (Benaki Museum, Athens, July 20–September 26, 2004) presented icons from Sinai that had been previously shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as part of the exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), curated by Helen C. Evans. 2. Vassilios N. Marinis in Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), ed. Helen C. Evans, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), 384–85, no. 240; Anastasia Drandaki, “The Sinai Monastery from the 12th to the 15th century,” in Pilgrimage to Sinai, Treasures from the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, exhibition catalog (Athens: Benaki Museum, 2004), 38–40, fig. 2.4. 3. On the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas, see Rebecca W. Corrie, “The Kahn and Mellon Madonnas and Their Place in the History of the Virgin and Child Enthroned in Italy and the East,” in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot:

66    Anastasia Drandaki Ashgate, 2005), 293–303, with earlier bibliography and an overview of the scholars’ debate regarding the Madonnas’ attribution. 4. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 24–35; Hayden Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), cf. 20–25. 5. See in particular, Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences; Ernst Kitzinger, “The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 20 (1966): 25–47, esp. 25–29 and 42–47; Hans Belting, “The ‘Byzantine Madonnas’: New Facts about Their Italian Origin and Some Observations on Duccio,” Studies in the History of Art of the National Gallery of Washington 12 (1982): 7–22; and Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 370–76. 6. The bibliography on the maniera greca is vast. Works that consider its content in a broader framework and approach the term critically include: Hans Belting, “Zwischen Gotik und Byzanz: Gedanken zur Geschichte der sächsischen Buchmalerei im 13. Jahrhundert” in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 41 (1978): 217–57; Hans Belting, “Introduction” and “Die Reaction der Kunst des 13. Jahrhunderts auf den Import von Reliquien und Ikonen” in Il Medio Oriente e l’ Occidente nell’ arte del XIII secolo, Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Storia dell Arte, vol. 2 (Bologna: CLUEB, 1982), 1–10, 35–53; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 370–76; Kurt Weitzmann, “Crusader Icons and Maniera Greca,” in Byzanz und der Westen: Studien zu Kunst des europäischen Mittelalters, ed. Irmgard Hutter (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984), 143–70; Robin Cormack and Stavros Mihalarias, “A Crusader Painting of St George: ‘Maniera greca’ or ‘lingua franca’?” Burlington Magazine 126 (1984): 132–41; Anthony Cutler, “La ‘questione bizantina’ nella pittura italiana: Una versione alternativa della ‘maniera greca,’” La pittura in Italia: L’Altomedioevo, ed. Carlo Bertelli (Milan: Electa, 1994), 335–54; Rebecca W. Corrie, “Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna del bordone and the Meaning of the Bare-Legged Christ Child in Siena and the East” Gesta 35, no. 1 (1996): 43–65; and Rebecca W. Corrie “The Perugia Triptych and the Transmission of Byzantine Art to the Maniera Greca,” Acts of the XVIIIth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Selected Papers, Main and Communications, Moscow, 8–15 Aug. 1991, vol. 3, Art History, Architecture, Music, ed. Ihor Ševčenko, Gennady G. Litavrin, Walter K. Hanak (Shepherdstown, WV: Byzantine Studies Press, 1999), 35–56; Valentino Pace, “Fra la maniera greca e la lingua franca: Su alcuni aspetti e problemi delle relazioni fra la pittura umbro-toscana, la miniatura della Cilicia e le icone di Cipro e della Terrasanta,” in Il classicismo: Medioevo, Rinascimento, Barocco, ed. Elena De Luca, Atti del Colloquio Cesare Gnudi (Bologna: Nuova alfa Editoriale, 1993), 71–90; and Valentino Pace “Le maniere greche: Modelli e ricezione,” Medioevo: I modelli, atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Parma, 27 settembre–1 ottobre 1999, ed. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (Milan: Electa, 2002), 237–50; Holger Klein, “Zwischen maniera greca und maniera italiana: Das Regensburger Gnadenbild und seine künstlerischen Vorbilder,” Die Alte Kapelle in Regensburg (Munich, 2001), 93–110; Ludovico V. Geymonat, The Parma Baptistery and its Pictorial Program (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006), esp. 160–67. 7. Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 644. 8. Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12–16. 9. See the fundamental studies by Manolis Chatzidakis who identified and dated correctly icons made in Cretan workshops of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Chatzidakis revised earlier erroneous opinions that attributed these works to an Italian-greek school of painting active in Italy, centered around Venice: Manolis Chatzidakis, “Essaie sur l’école dite ‘italogrecque’ précédé d’une note sur les rapports de l’art vénitien avec l’art crétois jusqu’à 1500,” in Venezia e il Levante fino al secolo XV, ed. Agostino Pertusi (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1974), 72–81; Manolis Chatzidakis, “Les débuts de l’école crétoise et la question de l’école dite italogrecque,” Μνημόσυνον Σοφίας Αντωνιάδη (Venice, 1974), 169–211; Manolis Chatzidakis, “La peinture des ‘Madonneri’

A Maniera greca    67 ou ‘veneto- crétoise’ et sa destination,” in Venezia, centro di mediazione tra oriente e occidente (secoli XV–XVI): Aspetti e problemi, ed. Hans-Georg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas, Agostino Perusi, vol. 2 (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1977), 674–90. See also Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromilides, “La pittura di icone a Creta Veneziana (seocoli XV e XVI): Questioni di mecenatismo, iconografia e preferenze estetiche,” in Venezia e Creta: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Iraklion-Chania, 30 settembre–5 ottobre 1997, ed. Gherardo Ortalli (Venice: Istituto veneto di sceinze, lettere ed arti, 1998), 459–507; Anastasia Drandaki, “Between Byzantium and Venice: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries” in The Origins of El Greco, Icon Painting in Venetian Crete, ed. Anastasia Drandaki, exhibition catalog (New York: Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, 2009), 11–18. 10. Mario Cattapan, “Nuovi elenchi e documenti dei pittori in Creta dal 1300 al 1500,” Thesaurismata 9 (1972): 202–35, cf. 211–15, documents 6–8. For an overview of the archival documents and their contribution in the study of the history of arts in Venetian Crete, see Maria KazanakiLappa, “Zωγραφική, Γλυπτική, αρχιτεκτονική: Η συμβολή των αρχειακών πηγών στην ιστορία της τέχνης,” in Venetiae quasi alterum Byzantium: Όψεις της Ιστορίας του βενετοκρατούμενου ελληνισμού; Αρχειακά τεκμήρια, ed. Chryssa A. Maltezou (Athens: Greek Culture Foundation, 1993), 435–84. 11. Drandaki, “Between Byzantium and Venice.” See also Olga Gratziou, “‘A la latina’: Ζωγράφοι εικόνων προσανατολισμένοι δυτικά,” DChAE 33 (2012): 357–68. I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Gratziou for sharing with me her paper prior to its publication. 12. Constantoudaki-Kitromilides, “La pittura di icone”; Drandaki, “Between Byzantium and Venice,” 14–16. 13. Viktor Lazarev had discussed the relation between the Italian maniera greca and the Cretan school of painting, but erroneously attributed the Cretan icons painted a la latina to an Italo-Greek school active in Venice in the fourteenth century; see Victor Lasareff, “Saggi sulla pittura veneziana dei sec. XIII–XIV, la Maniera Greca e il problema della scuola Cretese (IIo),” Arte Veneta 20 (1966): 43–61; and Viktor Lazarev, Storia della pittura bizantina (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1967), 407–10. For the critique by Manolis Chatzidakis, see n. 9 above. 14. Post-Byzantine icons remain outside the scope of most Byzantinists, with the exemption of scholars from Greece and Russia. At the same time, the conservative character of these icons sets them apart from Renaissance and early modern painting. Lately, however, there has been a stirring of interest in icon production postdating the fall of Constantinople in 1453. See, for example, the recent exhibition of the icons in the Menil Collection, published in an exemplary manner in Annemarie Weyl Carr, Imprinting the Divine: Byzantine and Russian Icons from the Menil Collection, exhibition catalog (Houston: Yale University Press, 2011). 15. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 330–48. 16. The most interesting contract of this type is an agreement signed in 1499 between two merchants, Giorgio Basejo and Petro Varsama, and three icon painters in the capital of Venetian Crete, Candia (modern Herakleion), who agree to paint seven hundred icons of the Virgin, five hundred of which in forma latina and the rest in forma greca. The painters had to follow specific models, and the color palette employed on the icons was determined up to the smallest detail; Cattapan, “Nuovi elenchi.” See also the detailed analysis of this contract in Gratziou “‘A la latina.’” 17. Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting, trans. and ed. Edward J. Olszewski (New York: B. Franklin, 1977), 256: “eccetto di pitture delle sacre imagini, le quali erano la maggior parte quadretti di certe figure fatte alla greca, goffissime, dispiacevoli e tutte affumicate, le quali ad ogni altra cosa parevano esservi state poste fuori che a muover divozione, overo a fare ornamento a simil luoghi.” First edition in Ravenna, 1587. 18. Klaus Krüger, “Medium and Imagination: Aesthetic Aspects of Trecento Panel Painting,” in Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento, ed. Victor M. Schmidt, Studies in Art History 61 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 57–81. Giovanni Dominici’s preaching, written

68    Anastasia Drandaki in 1401, was addressed to a noblewoman of Florence, Bartolomea degli Alberti; see Giovanni Dominici, Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. Donato Salvi (Florence, 1860), 132–33. On Dominici’s pedagogical views, see Giovanni Battista, L’ educazione dei Figli nella Regola di Giovanni Dominici (1355/6–1419) (Florence: Pagnini e Martinelli, 2002), esp. 126–38. 19. On the presence of icons for private devotion in private houses in late medieval Italy, see Victor M. Schmidt, Painted Piety, Panel Paintings for Personal Devotion in Tuscany, 1250–1400 (Florence: Centro Di, 2005), 90–106. 20. Schmidt, Painted Piety, 233–35. 21. Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromilides, “Ένθρονη Βρεφοκρατούσα και άγιοι: Σύνθετο έργο ιταλοκρητικής τέχνης,” DChAE 17 (1993–94): 285–302 (with earlier bibliography). 22. Αnthony Luttrell, “‘Le origini della precettoria capitolare di Santo Stefano di Monopoli” in Fasano nella storia dei Cavalieri di Malta in Puglia: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Fasano 14–15–16 maggio 1998), ed. Cosimo D’Angela and Angelo Sante Trisciuzzi (Tarente, 2001), 89–100 (repr. in Anthony Luttrell, Studies on the Hospitallers after 1306 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007], study no. XIV and Addenta et corrigenda, 5). For an overview of the relations between the Hospitallers and Byzantium, see John W. Barker, “Byzantium and the Hospitallers 1306–1421” in Bizanzio, Venezia e il mondo franco-greco (XIII–XV secolo), atti del Colloquio Internazionale organizzato nel centenario della nascita di Reymond-Joseph Loenertz o.p., Venezia, 1–2 dicembre 2000, ed. Chryssa A. Maltezou and Peter Schreiner (Venice: Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia, 2002), 41–63. 23. Constantoudaki-Kitromilides, “ Ένθρονη Βρεφοκρατούσα και άγιοι,” 292–94. 24. Dimitra Kotoula in Maria Vassilaki, ed., The Hand of Angelos: An Icon Painter in Venetian Crete, exhibition catalog (Aldershot: Lund Humphries in Association with the Benaki Museum, 2010), 100–1, no. 16. 25. Maria Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge 2001), 144. For the church of San Salvatore of the Augustinians, Olga Gratziou, Η Κρήτη στην ύστερη μεσαιωνική εποχή: Η μαρτυρία της εκκλησιαστικής αρχιτεκτονικής (Heraklion: Crete University Press, 2010), 34–40. 26. Anastasia Drandaki, Greek Icons 14th–18th Century: The Rena Andreadis Collection (Milan: Skira, 2002), 52–59; and Drandaki, “Between Byzantium and Venice,” 11. The same picture is drawn from the architectural and sculptural remains of the Venetian period in Crete; see Olga Gratziou, “Cretan Architecture and Sculpture in the Venetian Period,” in Drandaki, Origins of El Greco, 19–27; and Gratziou, Η Κρήτη στην ύστερη μεσαιωνική εποχή, 21–53. 27. For a typical Byzantine representation of St. Stephen, see, for example, the early fourteenthcentury icon in the Menil Collection (E. C. Schwartz, “The Saint Stephen Icon,” in Four Icons in the Menil Collection, ed. Bertrand Davezac [Houston: University of Texas Press, 1992], 46–55) or the wall painting in the church of Ayios Ioannis Prodromos, in Kritsa, Crete, dated to 1389–90: Klaus Gallas, Klaus Wessel, Manolis Borboudakis, Byzantinisches Kreta (Munich: Hirmer, 1983), 434, fig. 408 (dated erroneously in 1370; for the correct dating, see Ioannis Spatharakis, Dated Byzantine Wall Paintings of Crete [Leiden: Alexandros, 2001], 133–36.) 28. Jean C. Wilson, “Reflections on St. Luke’s Hand: Icons and the Nature of Aura in the Burgundian Low Countries during the Fifteenth Century,” in Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker, The Sacred Image East and West (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 132–46; Maryan W. Ainsworth in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 582–84, no. 349. 29. For a discussion on the creation of such legends in the Renaissance period, see Belting, Likeness and Presence, 342–48; Michele Bacci, Il pennello dell’ Evangelista: Storia delle immagini sacre attribuite a san Luca (Pisa: GISEM, 1998). 30. See previous note. See also Maryan W. Ainsworth, “‘À la façon grèce’: The Encounter of Northern Renaissance Artists with Byzantine Icons,” in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 545–55 and 584–86, no. 350.

A Maniera greca    69 31. Anthony Cutler, “The Pathos of Distance: Byzantium in the Gaze of Renaissance Europe and Modern Scholarship,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 23–45 (repr. in Anthony Cutler, Byzantium, Italy and the North: Papers on Cultural Relations [London: Pindar Press, 2000], study no. vii, 127–63); Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto. 32. See nn. 17–18. 33. Drandaki, “Between Byzantium and Venice,” 13–14. Generally on the demand for Byzantine manuscripts, paintings, and other works of art in Italy after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, see Anthony Cutler, “From Loot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to Byzantine Artifacts, ca. 1200–1750,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 237–67; Robert S. Nelson, “The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, ca. 1200–1450,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 209–35; Maria Georgopoulou, “Late Medieval Crete and Venice: An Appropriation of Byzantine Heritage” Art Bulletin 77, no. 3 (Sept. 1995): 479–96; Robert S. Nelson, “Byzantium and the Rebirth of Art and Learning in Italy and France,” in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 515–23; Robert S. Nelson, “Byzantine Art in the Italian Renaissance,” in Anastasia Drandaki, Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzi, and Anastasia Tourta, eds., Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections, exhibition catalog (Athens: Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Benaki Museum, 2013), 326–35. 34. Anthony Cutler, “Misapprehensions and Misgivings: Byzantine Art and the West in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Mediaevalia 7 (1984): 41–77 (repr. in Cutler, Byzantium, Italy and the North, study no. xvii, 474–509, esp. 508–9.) 35. See above n. 6; see also Valentino Pace, “Presenze e influenze cypriote nella pittura duecentesca italiana” in XXXII Corso di cultura sull’ arte Ravennate e Bizantina, Seminario Internazionale di studi su “Cipro e il mediterraneo orientale” (Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 1985), 259–98; and Valentino Pace, “Modelli da Oriente nella pittura duecentesca su tavola in Italia centrale” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Intitutes in Florenz 44, no. 1 (2000): 19–43; Michele Bacci, “Pisa bizantina: Alle origini del culto delle icone in Toscana,” in Intorno al Sacro Volto: Genova, Bisanzio e il Mediterraneo (secoli XI–XIV), ed. Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti, Colette Dufour Bozzo, and Gerhard Wolf (Venice: Marsilio 2007), 63–78; Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 513–27; Rebecca W. Corrie, “Sinai, Acre, Tripoli, and the ‘Backwash from the Levant’: Where Did the Icon Painters Work?” in Approaching the Holy Mountain, Art and Liturgy at St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel and Robert S. Nelson (Turnhout, Brepols, 2010), 415–48. On theoretical and methodological issues, see Cutler, “Misapprehensions”; Robert S. Nelson, “Byzantine Art vs Western Art,” in Byzance et le monde extérieur: Contacts, relations, échanges; Actes de trois séances du XXe Congrès international des Études Byzantines, Paris, 19–25 août 2001, ed. Michel Balard, Elisabeth Malamut, Jean-Michel Spieser (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2005), 255–70; Jean-Michel Spieser, “Art byzantin et influence: Pour l’ histoire d’ une construction,” Balard, Malamut, and Spieser, Byzance et le monde extérieur, 270–88. 36. For an overview of this debate see Corrie, “Kahn and Mellon Madonnas”; see also her entry in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 476–77, no. 286. 37. For a review of the different terms used by scholars, see Folda, Crusader Art, 513–27. On “Crusader” art, see also Titos Papamastorakis, “The ‘Crusader’ Icons in the Exhibition,” in Drandaki, Pilgrimage to Sinai, 46–63. 38. Cutler, “Misapprehensions.” 39. Drandaki, “Sinai Monastery.” Yuri Piatnitsky was the first to group the two icons of the archangels with the apostle Peter, in Sinai, Byzantium, Russia: Orthodox Art from the Sixth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Yuri Piatnitsky, Oriana Baddeley, Earleen Brunner, Marlia Mundell Mango, exhibition catalog (London: Saint Catherine Foundation, 2000), 250–51, no. S62. Maria Aspra Vardavakis proposes a different context for the Peter and Paul icons, grouping them

70    Anastasia Drandaki with a Christ Pantocrator and a Virgin in Intercession, but the latter pair, though clearly also part of a Deesis composition, is in my opinion undoubtedly earlier, has different stylistic and technical characteristics, and varying dimensions; see Maria Aspra Vardavakis, “Three Thirteenth-Century Sinai Icons of John the Baptist Derived from a Cypriot Model,” in Medieval Cyprus, Studies in Art, Architecture and History in Memory of Doula Mouriki, ed. Nancy Patterson-Ševčenko and Christopher Moss (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 179–93. 40. Kurt Weitzmann, The Saint Peter Icon of Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1983), 18, 33–34, figs. 15, 33–34. 41. A photograph of the back side of the Archangel Gabriel is published in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 385. All four panels repeat the same pattern (personal observation). 42. Robin Cormack in Byzantium 330–1453, ed. Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki, exhibition catalog (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2008), 370–73, 461, nos. 318–21. 43. Ibid, no. 322. 44. Georgi Parpulov, “Mural and Icon Painting at Sinai in the Thirteenth Century,” in Gerstel and Nelson, Approaching the Holy Mountain, figs. 104, 111, 114, 116. 45. Kurt Weitzmann, “Icon Programs of the 12th and 13th Centuries in Sinai,” DChAE 12 (1984): 63–116. 46. Svetozar Radojcić, Mileševa (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1963), pls. vi, ix, xi, xvii, xxiii. 47. Efthymios N. Tsigaridas, “The Mosaics and the Byzantine Wall-Paintings,” in The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, vol. 1 (Mount Athos: Monastery of Vatopaidi, 1998), 234–35, fig. 193. 48. Robin Cormack, “The Mother of God in the Mosaics of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople,” in Mother of God, Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki, exhibition catalog (Milan: Skira Editore, 2000), 107–23, esp. 118–23. 49. Mojmir Frinta, “An Investigation of the Punched Decoration of Medieval Italian and nonItalian Panel Painting,” Art Bulletin 47, no. 2 (1965): 261–64. 50. Jaroslov Folda in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 357–59, no. 216; Papamastorakis, “‘Crusader’ Icons,” 56. 51. Georgios Tsantilas, “Η λατρεία του αγίου Προκοπίου την περίοδο των σταυροφόρων και η βιογραφική εικόνα του στο Πατριαρχείο Ιεροσολύμων,” DChAE 27 (2006): 245–58; Titos Papamastorakis, “Pictorial Lives: Narrative in Thirteenth-Century Vita Icons,” Mouseio Benaki 7 (2007): 33–65, esp. 46–49. 52. Folda, in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 355–56 and 366–67; Papamastorakis, “‘Crusader’ Icons,” 57–59. 53. On the Sinai Crucifixion, see Helen C. Evans in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 367– 68, no. 224; on the Kahn Madonna, Corrie, “Kahn and Mellon Madonnas.” 54. Weitzmann, Saint Peter Icon, 33; and Kurt Weitzmann, “Icon Programs of the 12th and 13th Centuries at Sinai,” DChAE 12 (1984): 86–94 55. Kurt Weitzmann remarks that the Peter and Paul icons are “kept together today in the room north of the bema,” next to the modern seventeenth-century iconostasis of the Katholikon; Weitzmann, Saint Peter Icon, 33. 56. On Athanasios, see Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, ed. Erich Trapp et al., vol. 1 (Vienna: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Byzantinistik I/1, 1976), 37–38, no. 413; Albert Failler, “Le séjour d’ Athanase II d’ Alexandrie à Constantinople,” Revue des études byzantines 35 (1977): 43–71. 57. Georg S. J. Hofmann, Sinai und Rom (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1927); Bernard Hamilton, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum Publications, 1980), 318–21; Drandaki, “Sinai Monastery,” 28–36; and Anastasia Drandaki, “Through Pilgrims’ Eyes: Mt Sinai in Pilgrim Narratives of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” DChAE 27 (2006): 491–504. See also David Jacoby, “Christian Pilgrimage to Sinai until the

A Maniera greca    71 Late Fifteenth Century,” in Holy Image, Hallowed Ground, Icons from Sinai, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), 79–93. 58. Aimilia Giaouri, “Συντήρηση τοιχογραφιών,” Arch. Deltion 33 (1978): Chronika, 105; Silas Koukiaris, Τα θαύματα – εμφανίσεις των αγγέλων και αρχαγγέλων στην Βυζαντινή τέχνη των Βαλκανίων (Athens-Ioannina: Dodone, 1989), 65; Nikolaos B. Drandakis, “Σχεδίασμα καταλόγου των τοιχογραφημένων βυζαντινών και μεταβυζαντινών ναών της Λακωνίας,” Lakonikes Spoudes 13 (1996): 181, no. 74; Giorgos P. Fousteris, Εικονογραφικά προγράμματα σε βυζαντινούς σταυρεπίστεγους ναούς (PhD diss., University of Thessaloniki, Thessalonica 2006), 136–38, http:// invenio.lib.auth.gr/record/66080/files/gri-2007-1016.pdf?version=1. 59. Fousteris, Εικονογραφικά προγράμματα. 60. Nikolaos B. Drandakis, “Πόκος ή νεφέλη?” Epistemonike Epeteris Philosophikes Scholes Panepistemiou Athenon 26 (1979): 258–68; Chara Constantinides, O Ναός της Φανερωμένης στα Φραγκουλιάνικα της Μέσα Μάνης (Athens 1998). 61. Ilias Anagnostakis and Titos Papamastorakis, “St. Romanos epi ten sklepan: A Saint Protector and Healer of Horses,” in Animals and Environment in Byzantium (7th–12th c.), ed. Ilias Anagnostakis, Taxiarches Kollias, Eutychia Papadopoulou (Athens: Ethniko Idryma Ereunon, 2011), 137–64, esp. 140–41, fig. 4. 62. Mojmír S. Frinta “Raised Gilded adornment of the Cypriot Icons and the Occurrence of the Technique in the West,” Gesta 20 (1981): 333–47; Sophia Kalopissi, “Διακοσμημένοι φωτοστέφανοι σε εικόνες και τοιχογραφίες της Kύπρου και του ελλαδικού χώρου,” in Πρακτικά B’ Διεθνούς Kυπρολογικού Συνεδρίου, vol. 2 (Nicosia, 1986), 555–560; Doula Mouriki, “ThirteenthCentury Icon Painting in Cyprus,” Griffon 1–2 (1985–86): esp. 32–48; Annemarie Weyl Carr and Laurence J. Morrocco, A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered, the Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 98–110. 63. Rebecca W. Corrie in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 479, no. 288. 64. Sharon E. J. Gerstel, “Art and Identity in the Medieval Morea” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001), 263–85. 65. On St. Demetrios as patron saint of the Palaeologoi family, see Eugenia Russell, Saint Demetrius of Thessalonica, Cult and Devotion in the Middle Ages (Oxford: P. Lang, 2010), 20–21 and passim. See also the typicon of Michael VIII Palaiologos for the Monastery of St. Demetrios of the Palaiologoi-Kellibara in Constantinople, in John Thomas and Angela Constantinides-Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents: A Complete Translation of the Surviving Founders’ Typika and Testaments (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2000), 1237–53. 66. Manolis Chatzidakis, “Νεώτερα για την ιστoρία και την τέχνη της Μητρόπολης του Μυστρά,” DChAE 9 (1979): 143–74; Georgia Marinou, Άγιος Δημήτριος: Η Μητρόπολη του Μυστρά (Athens, 2002), 19–34. 67. St. Demetrius has an equally prominent place, directly opposite to the entrance, in the church of Hagioi Theodoroi in Kaphiona, Mani-Peloponnese, the most innovative and up-to-date painting ensemble of the thirteenth century in southern Lakonia. According to the dedicatory inscription, the wall paintings of Kaphiona were executed during the presence in the Peloponnese of the emperor’s brother, the sevastocrator Constantinos Palaiologos (between 1264 and 1270): Nicholas B. Drandakis, “Les peintures murales des Saints-Théodores à Kaphiona (Magne de Péloponnèse),” CahArch 32 (1984), 163–75; and Nicholas B. Drandakis, Βυζαντινές Τοιχογραφίες της Μέσα Μάνης (Athens, 1995), 70–100. 68. Derbes, Picturing the Passion, 158–72 and passim. 69. Mouriki, “Thirteenth-Century Icon Painting,” 9–112; Lucy-Anne Hunt, “A Woman’s Prayer to Saint Sergios in Latin Syria: Interpreting a Thirteenth-Century Icon at Mount Sinai,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 15 (1991): 96–145; Erica Cruikshank Dodd, “Christian Arab Painters

72    Anastasia Drandaki Under the Mamluks,” ARAM 9–10 (1997–98): 257–88; Mat Immerzeel, “Divine Cavalry: Mounted Saints in Middle Eastern Christian Art,” in East and West in the Crusader States: Context – Contacts – Confrontations, ed. Krijni Ciggaar and Herman Teule (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 265–86; and Mat Immerzeel, “Holy Horsemen and Crusader Banners: Equestrian Saints in Wall Paintings in Lebanon and Syria,” Eastern Christian Art in its Late Antique and Islamic Contexts 1 (2004): 29–60; Annemarie Weyl Carr, “Sinai and Cyprus: Holy Mountain, Holy Isle,” in Gerstel and Nelson, Approaching the Holy Mountain, 449–78; Rebecca W. Corrie, “Sinai, Acre, Tripoli, and the ‘Backwash from the Levant’: Where did the Icon Painters Work?” in Gerstel and Nelson, Approaching the Holy Mountain, 415–48. 70. For an overview of Byzantine art after the fourth crusade, see Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos, ed., Byzantine Art in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, The Fourth Crusade and Its Consequences, International Congress, March 9–12, 2004 (Athens: Akademia Athenon, 2007). For the Peloponnese where Goritsa is located, see in the same volume Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, “The Impact of the Fourth Crusade on Monumental Painting in the Peloponnese and Eastern Central Greece up to the End of the Thirteenth Century,” 82–88. 71. On the problem of attributions to Sinai, see the excellent assessment of methodological approaches by Nancy Patterson Ševčenko, “Manuscript Production on Mount Sinai from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century” in Gerstel and Nelson, Approaching the Holy Mountain, 233–58, esp. 233–39. 72. It has become a truism in the literature of the past decades that the reflective, burnished gold discs and the decorative patterns painted on the back of many middle Byzantine icons in Sinai are traits exclusive to icons made in situ. Obviously, this assumption is based on the lack of comparanda from other parts of the Byzantine world. However, a recently restored twelfth-century epistyle from the Vatopedi Monastery carries both features: the burnished gold halos on the obverse and circles inscribed with pearl-studded crosses on the back (Eythymios N. Tsigaridas, “Portable Icons,” in The Holy and Great Monastery of Vatopaidi, vol. 2 [Mount Athos: Monastery of Vatopaidi], 351–61, esp. figs. 296–98, 301–302). The epistyle was first studied by Manolis Chatzidakis, who published a photograph of its back (Manolis Chatzidakis, “Εικόνες επιστυλίου από το Άγιον Όρος,” DChAE 4 (1964–65): 377–400, pls. 77–86, esp. pl. 86a). As Chatzidakis has observed, the decoration on the back of the Vatopedi epistyle is the same as on a number of twelfth-century icons in Sinai: the Annunciation, the Heavenly Ladder of St. John Climacus, and two tetraptychs. For the first two icons, see Annemarie Weyl Carr and Kathleen Corrigan in The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261, ed. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), nos. 246–247. For the tetraptychs, see Georgios Soteriou and Maria Soteriou, Εικόνες της Μονής Σινά (Athens, 1956–58), fig. 171 (erroneously labeled as the back side of an icon with the Virgin and Child); and Mary Aspra-Vardavakis, “Παρατηρήσεις σε σιναϊτικό υστεροκομνήνειο τετράπτυχο,” DChAE 24 (2003), 211–22. 73. Vassiliki Foskolou “‘In the Reign of the emperor of Rome…’: Donor Inscriptions and Political Ideology in the Time of Michael VIII Paleologos,” DChAE 27 (2006): 455–62. 74. Gilbert Dagron, “Byzance et l’Union,” in 1274 - Année charnière: Mutations et Continuités, Actes du Colloque international du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris: CNRS, 1977), 191–202; Donald M. Nicol, “The Byzantine Reaction to the Second Council of Lyons, 1274,” Studies in Church History 7 (1971): 113–46. Generally, on Michael’s policy towards the West, see the classical study by Deno John Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 1258– 1262—A Study in Byzantine-Latin Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).