Page 48 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
discussions regarding rhetorical capability and astronomy.29 Andronikos ΙΙ Palaiologos was also deeply devoted to Orthodoxy and he applied himself to restore its prestige, which was previously affected by the inclination of his father Mihail VIII Palaiologos towards the union with the Roman Catholic Church.30
Therefore, in the royal court of Andronikos II Palaiologos a distinct cultural develop- ment occurred, which significantly influenced the last phase of Byzantine painting. The orientation of this era towards the study of humanities was one which combined Chris- tian theology with Classical philology. Undoubtedly, the cultural and spiritual revival which took place during the Palaiologan rule of Byzantium is most clearly exemplified in the preserved frescoes and icons.
Most of the names of artists of the Palaiologan period remain unknown. In fact, we know considerably little of the very best of them. For example, the mosaics and frescoes of the church of the Holy Apostles in Thessaloniki, which was founded by patriarch Ni- fonas around 1310–1314, are of the finest quality, yet there is no evidence of the names of their authors. In other important churches of Thessaloniki, such as St Panteleimonas, the Virgin of Chalkeon,31 and St Aikaterini, where the best of artists must have been em- ployed, there are only fragments of frescoes from the Palaiologan period (at St Pantelei- monas these are very few and extremely small), as these churches were systematically destroyed during the Ottoman rule. Due to such extensive damage, today we can only have an incomplete knowledge of the actual achievement of Palaiologan painting.
Although the most representative examples of the Palaiologan fresco painting and mosaic were completed in significant centres of the Byzantine Empire (Constantinople, Mount Athos, Thessaloniki, and Mistra), a number of Orthodox shrines outside the em- pire (such as those in medieval Serbia) were also decorated by the very best of artists that the empire had in its history. We have seen the work of some of these artists in our ear- lier discussion of the frescoes at Sopoćani – which belong to the early Palaiologan peri- od. Having described the historical and aesthetic significance of both the frescoes at Mileševa (which precede the Palaiologan period) and those at Sopoćani, throughout this sub-chapter we shall discuss the frescoes which were completed in the decades follow- ing the completion of frescoes at Sopoćani (c.1265).
29 Μαρία Καμπούρη-Βαμβούκου και Θανάσης Παπαζώτος, Η Παλαιολόγεια Ζωγραφική στη Θεσσαλονίκη (Αθήνα: Εκδόσεις Εξάντας, 2003), 10.
30 Ibid.
31 Panagia Chalkeon (Παναγία Χαλκέων: Virgin Mary of the Coppersmiths).
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