A QUICK RUN THROUGH POST-BYZANTINE ICON HISTORY

In a previous posting, I discussed the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the muslim Turks, and how even before that time some painters had emigrated to Crete, beginning the Cretan School of icon painting.  And I mentioned that even before the fall of the Cretan chief city of Candia to the Turks in 1669, some painters had already moved on to other places.  Some went west to Italy.  Others went north to the monastic settlements of Mount Athos, on the Northern Aegean Sea in Macedonia, bringing with them the influence of Italian painting models.  And some went elsewhere.

So icon painting did not die out in the Greek Orthodox world with the Fall of Constantinople.  Instead the trend was toward movement of icon painters away from the former urban centers and into more remote regions.  And a further tendency, particularly after the conquest of Candia, was away from “lay” icon painters to more monastic icon painters, and also to a more limited clientele than was available to Cretan painters.  So in this period, the painting of more stylistically conservative icons was centered in the already existing monastic settlements of Mount Athos in Macedonia, Meteora in central Greece, Ioannina in northwestern Greece, and other locales.  Some painters from Crete moved as far as Jerusalem and the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai.  But the major center of conservative Greek painting in this period was at Mount Athos, which in spite of the adoption of some “new” icon models from western Europe, continued to prefer a rather conservative and repetitive approach to icon painting, resulting in the kind of stagnation later deplored by many both in and outside the Eastern Orthodox realms.

Meanwhile, what was happening in the Slavic countries to the north?

Long before the fall of Byzantium, Greek Christianity was taken north and into Kievan Rus, where in 988 Prince Vladimir converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and also converted his people by edict (he did not bother to ask them).  Greek icon painters came north and began training the Slavs, who over time developed distinctive regional styles in such places as Novgorod and Pskov.  Native Russian saints such as Boris and Gleb began to appear in icons, and over time Russian painting looked less to Byzantium and more to the growing power of Moscow, which as mentioned previously, became the new center of Eastern Orthodoxy for Russians, particularly after Constantinople fell.

A major shift in Russian icon painting, which was conservative even while developing regional styles, took place in the middle of the 1600s, when Nikon, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, decided to force various changes that he considered reforms on the people.  He ordered alterations made in texts and in rituals, to bring them more into line with what he saw as “correct” Greek usage.  This caused tremendous dissension, because traditional Russians saw outward forms and usages as the manifestation of the “True Faith,” and so even such matters as changing the position of the fingers in blessing, or altering the spelling of the name of Jesus were seen as heresy, as abandoning the Orthodox belief handed down by their fathers.  But Nikon would not relent, and so a great schism took place in Russian Orthodoxy, with Nikon’s State Church on one hand, and the traditionalist “Old Believers” on the other.

Even though the Old Believers wanted to maintain Russian Orthodoxy as it had been practiced in Russia, the State Church declared them раскольники — raskolniki — “schismatics.”  And then the terrible persecutions of the Old Believers began by the State Church, using the powers of the Russian government as its punishing arm.

That did not, however, deter the Old Believers, who steadfastly kept to their views in spite of their chief spokesman, the Archpriest Avvakum, being murdered by the State Church.

The schism between State Church and Old Believers in the mid-1600s was just the first sign of a great change that affected Russian icon painting tremendously.  By the later 1600s, State Church painters had become strongly influenced by western European religious art, and imperial patronage favored western styles as well.  So where previously Russian icons had been very stylized and deliberately non-realistic, now the State Church favored a more realistic western approach, with Italian-looking saints and flowing draperies.  The Old Believers, however, kept strictly to the old stylized manner of painting, though over time western elements crept into their icons as well, generally as more realistic background landscapes while the saints themselves continued to be stylized rather than realistic.

The result of all this was that by the 19th century, much of State Orthodox religious art in Russia looked very much like Italian religious painting, while the Old Believers preserved the conservative and stylized icon forms that tend to be thought of as typically Russian today.

Of course Russia was not the only Slavic country to adopt Eastern Orthodoxy, and with it icon painting.  There was also Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania with its part-Romance, part-Slavic language.  Though previously strongly influenced by Byzantine icon painting, after the fall of Constantinople the Balkan countries began to develop their own distinctive styles, in spite of Turkish domination and oppression.  The tendency in the Balkans was for icon painting to continue in small and scattered workshops and monasteries rather than in the large cities where Turkish authority and dominance were most obvious.   Denied both the freedom and the markets of Russian icon painters,  neither the Balkans nor Greece, as a result of Turkish domination, ever developed the wide range of icon types that appeared in Russia, nor did the numbers of of icons produced in Greece and the Balkans ever reach the prodigious levels attained by the production of Russian icon painting workshops.

Keep in mind that Greece did not achieve recognized independence from the Ottoman Turks until 1832;

Bulgaria declared its independence from the Ottomans in 1908;

Serbia did not achieve full independence from the Ottomans until 1898;

Romania declared its independence of the Ottomans in 1877, but did not fully achieve it until the defeat of the Turks in 1878.

Of course by the time that Greece and the Balkans achieved independence from centuries of domination by the muslim Turks, the world had moved on, and Eastern Orthodoxy, though still prevalent in Greece and the Balkans, no longer had the power it once had.  There were little revivals of icon painting here and there, and attempts by conservative individuals such as Photios Kontoglou (1895-1965) in Greece to revive earlier standards of icon painting.  Kontoglou was influenced by the monastic works of Mount Athos and the pre-Cretan School frescos of Mistra, with a particular fondness for the painting of Theophanes the Cretan (died 1559), who though born in Crete, later lived and worked for a time as a monk at Mt. Athos; and also that of Frangos Katelanos, who worked at a number of the significant post-Byzantine sites, including Mount Athos, Meteora, Ioannina, Kastoria, etc. in the 1500s.

We see the influence of Kontoglou in many modern Greek Orthodox icons (particularly in the printed icons put out by Orthodox bookshops).  Many of them represent the kind of icon painting I call the “Play-doh” style, because the hair and beards of the saints in such neo-Greek icons look like the thick strands of “clay” extruded through that popular child’s toy device, the “Play-Doh Fun Factory.”  If you have seen them, you know what I mean.

In spite of such attempts at a neo-Byzantine styles, many  recent and modern popular icons and icon prints in Greece and the Balkans represent the more realistic manner favored for so long in Western popular religious art, making many Orthodox icons very similar in style to the “prayer cards” with pictures of Italian-style saints one still finds in Roman Catholicism.  Western converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, however, generally prefer more traditional styles, thinking them somehow “pure” while not realizing that Eastern Orthodox iconography has been influenced by European Catholic and Protestant religious art for centuries, whether in Russia, the Balkans or Greece.  This influence extended even to such traditional monastic centers as Mount Athos, which, for example, used images from the woodcuts of the German Catholic, then Lutheran artist Albrecht Dürer.

Of course there are other icon painting regions that I have not even touched on in this brief and very generalized overview, for example there are the icons of the Egyptian Coptic Christians and the very distinctive icons of Ethiopia, as well as those of Georgia, Armenia, etc.   But that will do for now.

 

 

A FUNDAMENTAL (BUT SADLY STILL FREQUENT) ERROR

This will be a very brief posting.

It is just a reminder that the surest way to make yourself appear an uneducated novice in the study of icons is to use the inaccurate and inappropriate expression “write” in relation to icons.  One does not “write” an icon (which should be obvious); one paints an icon.

I have explained why this rather silly usage arose — primarily in the United States — in a previous posting:

IS AN ICON PAINTED OR “WRITTEN”?

To make it very simple, it is a matter of linguistics.  In old Greek, to create either a painting or a letter was to “write” (graphein) it.  There was one word for both.  That was true whether one painted an image of a god or a bird or an image of anything else.

That was the case also in old Russia.  In Russian, pisat’ can mean both “to write” and “to paint.”  So pisat’ means to write in letters, as in writing a letter or book; but it also means to paint, as in painting a picture of any kind. as we see in these two illustrations from a Russian-language site:

ПИСАТЬ — PISAT’:  “TO WRITE”

 But also:

ПИСАТЬ — PISAT‘:  “TO PAINT”

But in English we PAINT icons and we WRITE a letter.  We have two distinct words for two different actions.

The common word in Russia for how one created an icon was pisat’, just as the word for creating the completely non-religious painting the boy is working on in the photo above is also pisat’.  It is not specific to icons or religious paintings, but used for other kinds of paintings as well.

So when people mistakenly say “write” an icon in English, it is not a matter of church doctrine, but simply of difference in language and mistaken translation.  That is why when the Cretan, Greek-speaking icon painter Andreas Ritzos (1421-1492) painted an icon of Mary for a customer in the Latin-using Catholic Church, he signed it in Latin, like this:

ANDREA RICO DE CANDIA PINXIT — “Andreas Ritzos of Candia Painted It.”

Note that he did not say SCRIPSIT — “Wrote It” — in Latin, even though he was a Greek-speaking icon painter.  Any educated person would have known that to be a mistake in Latin — the wrong word to use.  And it is a mistake also to say “write” an icon in English, because in English we paint an icon (or any painting) but we write a letter.

Similarly, when the Cretan icon painter Andreas Pavias painted an icon for a Greek-speaking customer, he wrote on it:

ΧΕΙΡ ΑΝΔΡΕΟΥ ΠΑΒΙΑ — Kheir Andreou Pavia — “The Hand of Andreas Pavias.”

But when he painted a Crucifixion for a Western customer, the signature on it was:

ANDREAS PAVIAS PINXIT DE CANDIA — “Andreas Pavias Painted It – of Candia.”

My point is that even Greek-speaking icon painters in one of the classic schools knew not to say “write” for paint when using a language that had distinct words for each.  And English again, like most European languages, does have distinct words for each.

One would have thought this bad habit — the result of a linguistic error — would have disappeared years ago, but it still shows up on the Internet.  It is as grating on the senses as hearing a politician say NOO-kya-ler for “nuclear.”

For more on the matter, here is an article in the Moscow Times:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/05/26/writing-music-and-paintings-a81303

SIMEON GOES FISHING IN SIBERIA

A popular saint in Russian icons of the late 19th-early 20th century was Simeon Verkhoturskiy — Simeon of Verkhoturye.  Here is a very simple “folkish” rendering of his icon type:

(Courtesy of Jacksonsauction.com)

The easy key to recognizing the most common type of Simeon icon is this:  He stands on the right side of a river, dressed in a simple Russian garment that goes down to his knees.  Beside him on the bank is his water bucket into which the fish he caught were placed.  And his fishing pole is also shown, though the painter of this image seems to have put the string on the land and the pole in the water.

In the background one usually sees a forest, perhaps with a church in the distance.  Some examples show an elaborate building complex as the main background feature, as in this central image from a more detailed example:

Here we see Simeon twice.  First, he stands facing the viewer, holding an admonitory scroll that reads:

Молю вас братия внемлить себъ имейте страх Божий и чистоту душевную. 
“I pray you, brothers, give ear: have the fear of God and purity of soul.”

Remember that scrolls are the “cartoon bubbles” of icons, through which the saint speaks to the viewer.

Second, beside the standing Simeon, and without realistic perspective, we see Simeon depicted again, seated on the river bank with fishing pole in hand.  Beside him is his bucket.

The painter of this image has replaced the usual rural and forested background with a large and reasonably accurate depiction of the ecclesiastical complex that stands on the other side of the Tura River in Verkhoturye.  Jesus blesses from the clouds above.

Simeon is one of those saints based on a rather scanty story.  He is said to have been from a wealthy family in western Russia, but being of a religious nature, he decided to go east — very far east — to Siberia.  He stopped first at Verkhoturye,  but then moved on to settle in the more remote village of Merkushino.  There he lived a simple life, fishing for his daily food some miles from Merkushino, while in cold weather he sewed coats and other necessities for the local people, and of course spent lots of time in prayer and fasting and evangelizing the locals.  He had the very annoying habit of sneaking away before the sewing of a garment was quite finished, supposedly so that the customer would not try to pay him for his work.

In 1642 he died — it is said of excessive fasting.  In the accounts of native Russian saints, one frequently comes across a persistent and even admired fanaticism and extremism in bodily deprivation.  He was buried in the churchyard of the Church of the Archangel Michael at Merkushino.  Nothing happened for about fifty years.  Then in the year 1692, the locals found a coffin had pushed up out of the ground.

Now if you have read the posting in the archives on the boy saint Artemiy Verkolskiy, you will know that Russians were suspicious of bodies that did not just decay away, either for good or for ill.  In the case of  the Simeon’s body, miraculous events were said to be occurring since it had turned up, and someone notified the Metropolitan of Tobolsk, a high church official named Ignatiy Rimsky-Korsakoff.  He decided to have the matter investigated.  But it was found that no one locally could remember who the fellow in the coffin was.

Well, in another case of “it came to me in a dream,” an emissary sent by the Metropolitan to investigate, a certain Hierodeacon named Nikifor Amvrosiev, fell asleep after prayer and saw a man in a dream.  The man was dressed in white, was middle-aged, and with brownish-blond (it is called “rus” in the podlinniki) hair.  Nikifor asked the man who he was, and he replied, “Я Симеон Меркушинский,”  — “I am Simeon of Merkushino.”  Then he vanished.

So that gave the body in the coffin a name.

The Metropolitan certified the body as “incorrupt” (though that did not seem to be entirely the case).  Nonetheless, a wide range of miracles attributed to Simeon were said to occur in the following years, and he was officially “glorified” and entered in the list of saints in 1694.

The standard podlinnik (painter’s manual) description of Simeon reads:

Святый и праведный Симеон Меркушинский и Верхотурский, иже в Сибири новый чудотворец; подобием рус, брада и власы на главе аки Козьмы Безсребренника; ризы на нем просты, русския.

“The Holy and Righteous Simeon Merkushinskiy and Verkhoturskiy, who is in Siberia the new Wonderworker; likeness rus [there’s that term meaning brownish-blonde hair again]. beard and hair on the head like Cosmas the Unmercenary; the robe on him simple, and Russian.”

One has to be a little careful with the title inscriptions for Simeon Verkhoturskiy, because sometimes a painter will write ПР, which one might mistake for abbreviating Prepodobnuiy, “Venerable” — the title of a monk saint.  But Simeon was not a monk.  Instead, the ПР in this case abbreviates ПРАВЕДНЫЙ — Pravednuiy — meaning “Righteous.”  More careful painters abbreviate it as ПРАВ.

The “relics” of Simeon (what remained of his body) were taken from Merkushino to Verkhoturye in 1704.  In 1880 a charitable brotherhood was founded in his name to support missionaries and schools.  Not long before the Revolution, Simeon’s relics were transferred to the newly-built Exaltation Cathedral at the Nikolaev Monastery in Verkhoturye.  All of this publicity from the late 1800s to just before the Revolution helps to account for why so many icons of Simeon Verkhoturskiy come from that period.

 

IOASAF, SIMEON, AND THE GUARDIAN ANGEL

One encounters many icons that show two or more saints that seem to have been randomly thrown together, but of course originally they were not random.  They were either the “name” saints of members of the family who owned the icon (called a семейная икона — semeinaya ikona — “family icon”) or sometimes a combination of “name” saints and saints chosen because they were specialists in helping with certain things (patron saints, as they are called in the West).

Here is a typical example of such an icon:

(Courtesy of Jacksonsauction.com)

Let’s look at the inscriptions:

That at left reads:

ПР(Д) ИОАСАФЪ ЦАРЕВИ(Ч).  The letters in parentheses are superscript (written above) letters.  So in full, the inscription would read transliterated:

PREPODOBNUIY IOASAF TSAREVICH 

You already know that Prepodobnuiy (literally “most like”) is the title used for a monk saint. Ioasaf (or Ioasaph) is his name.  And Tsarevich is his secondary title.  It means literally “Son of the Tsar,” which can be either “Son of the Emperor” or “Son of the King.”  Here it means “Son of the King,” or more loosely, “Prince.”

Now who was this fellow, shown as a monk here?  Well, if the painter had had more space, he would have added an additional word, like this:

Прп. Иоасаф Царевич Индийский
Prepodobnuiy Tsarevich Indiyskiy

That last word — Indiyskiy — means “of India.”  So this saint is “Venerable Ioasaf, Prince of India.”

Now if you have read every posting in the archives (well, maybe you have nothing else to do), you will recall from an earlier article that the saint named Ioasaf, Prince of India has a very interesting origin.  He was actually originally not a Christian saint at all.  He was, in fact the Buddha.  When the story of his early life came west on the Silk Road, spread by Buddhist missionaries, it was taken up in the Christian West and modified to make the “Prince of India” a Christian saint.  So, as I always say, the official Eastern Orthodox Church Calendar actually commemorates the Buddha in a “Christian” guise.

There are two ways of depicting Ioasaf.  The first is to show him robed as a King, often with his fictional advisor Varlaam (Barlaam); the second is to show him after he became an ascetic, robed as a monk, which is how he is depicted in this icon.   However he is shown, his icons make interesting conversation pieces because of Ioasaf’s unusual Silk Road origins.

The middle figure in the icon is:

СВЯТЫЙ АГГЕЛЪ ХРАНИТЕЛЬ
Svyatuiy Angel Khranitel’ — “Holy Angel Guardian,” or in better English, “The Holy Guardian Angel.”  This is a generic figure representing the guardian angel that is believed in Eastern Orthodoxy to accompany each believer.  He is often shown with a sword to demonstrate his power to protect.  The Guardian Angel is a very common figure both in icons and as a border image.

The third saint in this icon, the one at right, is:

ПРЕПОДОБНЫЙ СИМЕОНЪ СТОЛПНИК
Prepodobnuiy Simeon Stolpnik — “Venerable Simeon the Pillar-guy,” or as it is usually translated, “Venerable Simeon Stylites.”  Simeon (died 459) did exist.  He was one of those wild and odd Middle Eastern ascetics.  In his case, he  chose to live atop a pillar in Syria, supposedly to get away from crowds of people (no, that’s not likely to attract attention).   He stayed atop his pillar for some 37 years, and of course made such a spectacle of himself that he attracted even larger crowds of people, and became quite famous, a celebrity in his day.

Now why were these particular saints chosen for this icon?  The Guardian Angel served an obvious purpose as a daily protector.  As for Simeon, today he is often considered the fellow to pray to in order to bring back those who have left the Church (he must be very busy with the numbers leaving these days), but it is more likely that he was chosen for this icon simply because he is the name saint of someone named Simeon.

As for Ioasaf, he too was chosen because he was the name saint of a person involved with the icon.  Given that there is no female saint depicted, we may reasonably assume that this icon was painted for two brothers in a family, brothers named Ioasaf and Simeon, and that the Guardian Angel in the center was expected to represent the guardian of each of the brothers.

At the top of the icon is a small depiction of the “Not Made by Hands” image of Jesus — the image, according to legend, that was created when Jesus pressed his wet face against a cloth.

 

 

 

MIND YOUR MANNERS: THE CRETAN SCHOOL OF ICON PAINTING

If you happened to be a Byzantine Greek in 1453, it was not a good year.  It was a disaster.  In that year Constantinople, the chief city of the Eastern Orthodox world, the focus of Byzantine civilization, fell to the invading muslim Turks.

The news sent shock waves as far north as Russia, where the fall of Constantinople, known as Tsargrad — the “Emperor City” — was seen as a judgment from God.  It was felt in ultra-conservative Russia that the Byzantines had been much too friendly with the Latin Catholic West, much too interested in some kind of reunification between the Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christianity.  And so, the Russians decided, God had taken the crown away from Byzantium, and had bestowed it upon “Holy Russia,” which took on itself the title of “Third Rome.”  The first Rome had fallen, the second Rome — Constantinople — had fallen, Russia was now the Third Rome, and as they said, “a Fourth there shall not be.”

People in the 1400s had been very worried, both in Byzantium and in Russia, because according to Eastern Orthodox belief, the world had been created in 5,508 B. C.  And just as the world had been created in six days, and God rested on the seventh day, it was widely thought that the world would last no longer than seven “days” consisting of 1,000 years each — 7,000 years.  That 7,000 years would be completed in the year 1492.

Some icon painters in Byzantium, however, had seen trouble coming, and had already moved to a safer place.  And after the fall of Constantinople, others followed them.  That safer place, that haven for refugee iconographers, was the island of Crete, which at that time was known, after the name of its chief city, as Candia.  There the business of icon painting (and it was a business, make no mistake) could not only continue, but could flourish.  It was safe because the Island was under the control of the Republic of Venice (in what is now Italy), which had taken it from the Byzantines in 1205.

Venetian control meant not only that the icon painter refugees from the Byzantine Empire could practice their craft in peace, but it also meant they had a ready-made market for religious art in the Catholic West, through the Venetian Republic, and further that through a kind of cultural interchange, Cretan iconographers were exposed not only to Italian religious art of the Gothic period, but also to the art of the blossoming Italian Renaissance.  That gradually  brought Italian influence and softness and feeling into Cretan iconography.

Before the fall of Byzantium, much emphasis had been placed on the art of mosaic, used to ornament the walls of churches.  But mosaic — and its cheaper substitute fresco painting — are by nature largely immovable art forms, and on Crete, which relied heavily on sea trade,  it was very important for religious art to be easily portable.  It had to be transported by ship, and in large quantity.  So the focus in Crete was primarily on the painting of icon panels on wood.

When Venetian merchants sent their orders for new icons to Candia — and they ordered them by the hundreds — they told the iconographers just what they wanted, sometimes even down to the color of garments.  But the major distinction in the ordering of icons was between two different styles of painting.  Some icons, it was specified, should be painted in the Greek style, the Greek manner — the maniera greca, but also large numbers of religious images were ordered to be painted according to the prevailing taste of the Italians  — in the maniera latina — the “Latin manner.”  The Greek manner was the style customary in Greek Orthodoxy, and the Latin manner was that preferred at the time by the Latin-using Catholic Church in Italy.

The Greeks, in spite of their historical and theological differences, felt much closer to the Catholic West than to the church-and-icon destroying Turks, and certain iconographic elements of Western theology even began to enter Greek Orthodox art.

The icon painters of Candia, of Crete, then, had no qualms about painting images for western Catholics along with painting for Eastern Orthodox customers.  After all, painting was their livelihood.  In fact one Cretan icon painter eventually gave up icon painting entirely and moved west, ending up in Spain, where he was called by his new countrymen “The Greek” — El Greco.  But he still signed his paintings — no longer icons but a kind of mannerist religious art — in Greek.

In fact speaking of signing, it was the icon painters of Candian Crete who popularized the signing of icons with the name of the artist.  And so today we still know who the painters of many of those Cretan icons were, something that cannot be said of most earlier icons.

The Cretan School of icon painting began flourishing in the second half of the 1400s.  Some iconographers, as mentioned earlier, had already immigrated even before the fall of Constantinople; others came after.

Among the well-known earlier Cretan iconographers was Angelos Akotantos — Άγγελος Ακοτάντος –who signed his icons ΧΕΙΡ ΑΓΓΕΛΟΥ — Kheir Angelou — “The Hand of Angelos” — and died c. 1457-1450.  Though borrowing some western motifs, his painting was largely conservative, preserving the Byzantine style favored in the 15th century.

Here is an example of his work — ΑΓΙΟC ΦΑΝΟΥΡΙΟC — Hagios Phanourios — “Holy Phanourios,” a warrior saint.  Notice the red border around the outer edge, and bright gold background, both generally characteristic of Cretan School icons; the red outer border is also found in later Greek iconography.

Phanourios is a rather obscure saint.  His veneration, which was prominent both on Rhodes and Crete, is completely dependent on the story that when the Turks ruled Rhodes, they wanted to rebuild the city walls, and began taking stones from ruined buildings for that purpose.  As they did so, they supposedly came across a church, and digging within it they discovered several old and disintegrating icons.  Among them, however, was one that looked bright and new, depicting a young warrior and scenes of his martyrdom, and the title read “Holy Phanourios.”  And that slim tale — whether true or not — was enough to put him in the calendar of saints.  Later he became known as a patron saint of finding lost objects, probably because his name is derived from φανερώνω — phanerono — meaning “I reveal.”  A folk belief in Greek Orthodoxy is that to get Phanourios to help you find something, it is considered wise to bake a panouropita (phanouropita) — a “Phanourios cake,” and to have it blessed by a priest.

There were a number of other Cretan School painters whose names are known today, and their work, over time, increasingly showed the influence of art in Italy of that period.

The same trouble that had brought Constantinople to ruin, however, eventually came to Crete.  The muslim Ottoman Turks fought the Venetians for control of the island from 1645-1669, and finally the chief city itself, Candia (now Iraklion) fell in 1669.  Even before its fall, however, icon painters had begun leaving the island, some going northward into Orthodox strongholds where they resumed the more conservative maniera greca, and others going to Italy, where they continued working largely in the maniera latina.

By 1715, the island of Crete was completely under muslim Turkish control, but by then its once flourishing “school” of icon painting had come to an end.