In this airy casket of a city, surrounded by the elaborate and fastidious array of an imperial household and a court of nobles and prelates and aulic dignitaries and men of letters, a succession of purple-born princes reigned: strange and stately figures in their fur-trimmed robes and melon-crowned caps-of-maintenance. The libraries filled with books, poets measured out their stanzas, and on the scaffolding of one newly-risen church after another painters mixed their gypsum and cinnabar and egg-yolk and powdered crocus and zinc and plotted the fall of drapery and described the circumference of haloes. It was the last age of Byzantine mysticism, and, most important of all, Mistra, right up to its eclipse, was the seat of the last Greek Neoplatonist revival, presided over by the Great Gemistus Plethon, one of the most redoubtable scholars of Europe. He it was who argued the niceties of dogma with the Western Car-dinals at the Council of Florence; and, long after Mistra had died, Sigismondo Malatesta, to add the lustre of scholarship to his usurped principality, translated his bones to a splendid sarcophagus on the walls of his temple at Rimini. In courtyards murmurous with philosophic argument and debate and syllogism, Gemistus contrived the same Platonist system and semi-pagan cosmogony that he presided over at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Far from the twilit, miasmal, gong-tormented Bosphorus and the vapours of the Golden Horn, this was the world, rock-perched in the heart of the crystalline air above the loops of the Eurotas and the olive woods of Lacedaemon, which fostered the genesis of these paintings. Mistra is an extinct star now; but, embedded in that upheaval of mineral,—battered and cracked and weather-fretted on the walls of the churches of the Periblepton, the Metropolis, the Brontochion and the Pantanassa,—one can see a miraculous surviving glow of the radiance that gave life to this last comet as it shot glittering and sinking across the sunset sky of Byzantium.
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Almost anything, in the boundaries and possibilities of Byzantine art, would be a step back after this. Cretan painting is more a step aside than a regression. Those bonds of tradition which Mistra had shaken loose are there, but they have changed; where they induced a droop in the Macedonian school, they are worn in the Cretan with a swagger. The muscular and etiolated faces assume an unearthly frown of defiance, sometimes a scowl; and in their robes the flow of multiple folds and pleats in contrasting colours, as though of shot material—one of the great features of all Eastern painting—take on something more violent; they become taut radiations of expanding zigzags from the bent elbow or knee which has confined them. Goat-skin becomes shaggier, caves in the mountain-side look as though torn open with a blade and the jutting Sinais and the stepped and toppling crags, sundered by ravines with all the fierceness of the actual Cretan ranges, are in a state of faction: they are an insurrection of colossal geometric ghosts. As in the island itself, dramatic tension is stretched between those soaring commotions of rock—golden or peach-coloured, or vitreous or ice blue or hard as steel or ashen and aghast—on taut invisible threads. The figures, like the Cretans themselves, are illuminated and intensely masculine, a manic-depressive compound of brooding melancholy and exaltation; and the inner light, which the Macedonians lost in a measure, shoots from the sinister shadows undimmed. But in spite of their energy, there is nothing uncouth or brutal in these painted saints as there was among the Cappadocians; and, for all their vigour, they are instinct with Byzantine introversion. They are far removed from materialism, and the tension, the violence and the tragedy are all in the world of spirits. The detail is subtle and delicate: the cartographic wrinkles and circling contour-lines on the saints’ faces, the line of nose and nostril, the sweep of those hoary eyebrows over each of which beetles an outlined irascible and thought-indicating bulge; the dark and, by contrast, etiolating triangles that project point downwards from the lower lids, the bristling curl of the white locks round foreheads that catch the light like polished teak, the prescribed complexity of their beards cataracting in effulgent arcs or erupting like silver quills from swarthy physiognomies—all of this, on close inspection, proves to be built up of complementary planes of brick red and apple green applied with delicate impressionism to the black phantom of the saint or paladin beneath. The emergence of this dark background under a luminous and fragmentary carapace of skilfully superimposed light and colour (a technique explained in precise detail by Dionysios of Phourna for those wishing to paint Krétika) is the earmark of the Cretan mode. I am tempted to relate this very strange technique, especially in ikons of Our Lord, with reasons that are not purely plastic. It calls irresistibly to mind a characteristic passage of St. Dionysios the Areopagite: “The Divine Dark,” writes this other Dionysios, “is the inaccessible Light in which God is said to dwell, and in this Dark, invisible because of its surpassing radiance and unapproachable because of the excess of the streams of supernatural light, everyone must enter who is deemed worthy to see or know God.”[11]
The Cretan school is like a wonderful reprieve after the final catastrophe, for, owing to its mountainous inaccessibility and the division of spoils at the Fourth Crusade, which allotted it to the Venetians—or rather to Boniface of Monferrat, who sold it to the Doge at once—Crete was Venetian still. It became a place of refuge for the Greek world, a centre of Hellenism and a workshop of literary and artistic energy. We have seen[12] that the Cretans had established strong roots in Venice; in Crete itself they more than held their own, large quantities of Venetian families settled in Crete and many of their great names are now scattered among the villages and sheepfolds. This strange gunshot marriage of lagoon and crag seems to have continued (at any rate on the intellectual level), with the inevitable insurrections, in a protracted honeymoon. The island was graced with a positive pleiad of painters, poets and playwrights. Cultures interwove and the educated Greeks and the long-established Venetians were largely bilingual. It is thus remarkable how little Venetian influence can be detected when the Cretan school first came into prominence, just as it is remarkable that there are scarcely a dozen Italian words in the ten thousand lines of the great Cretan epic poem, the Erotokritos (1604), in spite of the author’s name, which was Vincentios Cornaros. Towards the end Venetian influences crept in and, decadence though it may be, even though the peculiar Byzantine radiation grew tamer in the conventions of chiaroscuro, there is something both captivating and splendid about the flame reds and the hints of Titian and Veronese in the folds of satin and velvet and the red-gold glint of the scaly breastplates of warrior-saints.
After the island fell in 1669, the movement succumbed to the usual Ottoman blight; little remained, and, dispersed abroad, it died in the eighteenth century. But it was during its virile zenith in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that it affected Greece. Its finest monument in fresco—one of the few that remain—is in Mount Athos. Others survive, half-way to the sky, in the Meteora[13] in Thessaly. But Cretan ikons, glowing on slabs of olive, walnut, hard pine, poplar and plane, travelled all over the archipelago and the mainland and to Venice, where dark Cretan madonnas had long adorned palazzi; and to Russia. Alongside the Macedonian school, and often painted by non-Cretan hands, the Cretan technique was the strongest strain in the iconography of occupied Greece. These fierce saints and holy heroes and haggard Christs and Panayias formed a kind of pictorial resistance movement against apathy. It is lucky such a definite and vigorous style was there to fend off the inevitable catalepsy. One by one the sources of inspiration—Asia Minor, Cyprus, the Mainland, Constantinople, Mistra, Trebizond, the Archipelago and finally Crete—had been trampled out. When at last the stagnation of endless reproduction set in, their function became indeed that of Celestial guerrillas; at war not with a theological foe but against the occupying stranger.
There is another development or deviation which is of great sociological and historical interest, but of little relevance to the present theme: the Italianization of painting in the Ionian islands. For this western archipelago remained in Venetian hands from the crusades until the French Revolution (when after a
short French interregnum, they were British for half a century) and though the inhabitants remained staunchly Orthodox—indeed, some noble families of Italian origin, and thus Catholic, like the Capodistrias of Corfu and the Romas of Zante, ended up themselves as Orthodox—the influence of Venice and the Italian studios and universities, especially Padua, was strong. To such an extent was Italian the cultural language of the bilingual élite that the Zantiot poet Ugo Foscolo wrote exclusively in Italian; so it was too, until he was well on in years, with one of Greece’s greatest modern poets, his fellow-islander, Solomos.
The Ionian islands were the only part of the Greek family which entirely escaped the dead hand of the Turks. Cut off for six centuries by only a few miles of sea from the tragic doings of the mainland, they were part of Europe. Crescents and minarets rose on the Epirote shore, while, across the narrow channel, the Ionians, in Elizabethan ruffs, then powdered wigs and finally stove-pipe hats and cutaways, participated in a quiet and provincial fashion in the Renaissance and the ripening afternoon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the early Romantic movement of the nineteenth. It is a proof of the vitality of Hellenism that the comparative mildness of the Doge’s suzerainty and the absence of the mainland’s ruthless challenge should have left their intrinsic Greekness so unimpaired. Without the age-old identification of Greek with Orthodoxy, perhaps they would have become Uniates at least, like the Orthodox of the Ukraine or the Banat and, finally, the Maniots of Cargese. But they often took part in hostilities against the Turks (notably at Lepanto), under the Lion of St. Mark; and after the fall of Candia, Cretans flocked as thickly into the Ionian as they did into the Mani; and the islands were for centuries a refuge for the klephts and armatoles of the mainland. Despite the Venetian fleshpots, their sympathy and their participation in the struggle of their fellow-countrymen was entire. The first head of the resurrected Greek State—Count Capodistria—was an Ionian and the Seven Islands became a great national hearth of Greek poetry. There might have been advantages to the Ionians later on, in remaining part of the British Empire; but towards the end of our occupation the ideological outcry for reunion to the Greek State became loud and determined. Wisely, and with lasting benefit to all, Enosis was conceded.
In spite of the unwavering Hellenism of the Seven Islands, Venice inevitably left strong superficial traces culturally, socially, architecturally, and to a very slight extent, linguistically, but most considerably in the arts. It certainly influenced ikon-painting. The first detectable symptoms of deviation from the Byzantine canon is a mild softening-up that might be traced to Tiepolo. This trend was hit by Cretan influence from two sides: from Venice, where it was already established, and from Crete itself before, and especially after, the Fall. The results of this are lively and original. But slowly, with passing of time, the figures echoed in their provincial and less deft way, the metropolitan prototypes of Venice and the rest of Italy; and many of the ikons among the gilt and brass of baroque and rococo iconostases became oval or circular, which is very rare in the rest of Orthodoxy. The treatment of sacred subjects drifted further and further from the abstraction of Byzantium until the ambience is the tired, diffused and muted light of a minor Italian studio when the Counter-Reformation had spent itself. The umbered faces are all too human and unillumined and unenigmatic in their verisimilitude of smooth cheek and appealing eye and droop of lip and fold of mantle. The supernal light is filtered through the dishcloth of chiaroscuro, the cosmetics of morbidezza are busy. I demanded, some pages back, a more comprehensible notation: I am killed with kindness here; for, in these ikons, the purpose of the concession is lost. This elegant subsidence to earth is not what I was after, which was some kind of iconographic change to enable the ethical and moral part of religion to keep pace with the tribal and magical part until the expulsion of the Turks. But this late Ionian painting is part of the general western European deflation in religious art, a slow draining away of the supernatural from pigment and stone and clay. Some of them—framed in a leafy swirl of ba-roque gilding—are very fine indeed: but they are no longer,—except geographically—Greek.[14] They are part of the painting of the West, and, as such, worthy of a much more dignified place in any conspectus of European art than they have yet received, except in an admirable study by Procopiou. But they have defected completely from the line we have been following and have no relevance to it. They have, of course, apart from their merits, the great charm of historical oddity. The beautiful eighteenth-century ikon—if it can be called that; it is closer to an enlarged predella—of the Procession of St. Dionysius in the Cathedral of Zante (happily saved from the 1953 earthquake; I saw it next day in the burning wreckage of that lovely vanished town), in which the saint’s catafalque is escorted by a crocodile of tricorned nobili huomini, might be the work of a remote septinsular cousin of Longhi or Guardi. We have floated a long, long way from St. Sophia and Ravenna and the old basilicas of Rome and Holy Luke and Torcello and Athos and Daphni and Salonika and Palermo and Cefalu and Monreale and the Chora and SS. Sergius and Bacchus and Nea Moni in Chios and Kastoria and Nerezi and Mistra and the Meteora and the Cappadocian rock monasteries; and almost as far from the ikon-painting in progress in the klepht-haunted and bullet-echoing crags of Acroceraunia and Epirus and Acarnania just over the water....
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The inscrutability of ikons has done nothing to choke off devotion; indeed, the oldest and most indistinct invite the steadiest fervour of rural iconodules. This is especially true if they have thaumaturgic acts to their credit—feats of healing, the repulsion of barbarians and infidels from a city wall or timely intervention in battle, like the vision of Pan at Marathon, or of the Gemini at Lake Regillus. Some of them have miraculous origins: they were dropped from heaven or dug out of the earth after their location had been revealed in a dream. Our Lady of Tinos, who is responsible for many miraculous cures at her yearly feast, had such a beginning: she was exhumed on the very day that the standard of revolt against the Turks was raised in 1821, which surrounds her island with a patriotic as well as religious and thaumaturgic aura. Several ikons have specific healing properties, a function they share with certain holy remains, like those of St. Gerasimos on the slopes of Mt. Ainos in Cephalonia, whose reliquary, borne yearly over the prone ranks of ailing pilgrims, cures madness. Ikons have been known to fly many homing miles through the air to resettle in the chapels whence profane hands have reft them. There is a category known as acheiropoietoi—“not made with hands.” One of these, Our Lady of Edessa (where iconoclast troops were later to stone a wonder-working Christ), led the Emperor Heraclius all the way to Ctesiphon to rescue the True Cross from Chosroes in the battle which is immortalized on the walls of Arezzo.
Attributions to the brush of St. Luke are much less fre-quent than in Italy. There are only three, I think, which, in the Orthodox world, are incontradictably held to be the apostle’s work. I have seen two of these Lukes, one in the monastery of Megaspelion which juts from the high rock face of an Achaean gorge, the other in the monastery of Kykko in western Cyprus. It was difficult to discern more, in either case, than the uneven convexities of what appeared to be black wax jutting from a buckled and almost all-obscuring plastron of silvergilt. The third is our Lady of Soumela, an ancient lodestar for oriental pilgrimage in the huge monastery towering above the valley of the Of, inland from Trebizond.[15] When the Greeks (who had lived there without interruption almost since the occasion when Xenophon’s army espied the sea from a neighbouring height) were uprooted at the exchange of populations in 1922, she came too; and after four decades of obscurity in Athens, she was re-enshrined with great state in a part of western Macedonia where a population of her former Laz-speaking votaries had been resettled.
Black holy objects, in the world at large, seem to invite special veneration; I think of these ikons, and of the vanished smoke-blackened Virgin, from which the old Byzantine Church of the Kapnikarea in Athens derives its name; and of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, t
he Black Christ of Lucca and a small dark Virgin among the canefields near the pitch-lake in Trinidad, all of them heavy with mana.
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