Page 75 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter I
where he developed a highly authentic Byzantine style of his own (Theophanes the Greek), could be regarded as the El Greco that went to Russia.105
The most basic conclusion of our discussion in this chapter is that in the Byzantine world there were a number of El Greco’s predecessors whose work, at its best, for rea- sons which were discussed here, merits the same level of appreciation as El Greco’s work of the later phase. Given that El Greco is considered to be a forerunner of the 20th centu- ry Modern and Abstract painting, such a conclusion should prompt a serious re-evalua- tion of how we perceive Late Byzantine and Post Byzantine painting from a contempo- rary perspective.
105 In his book entitled Byzantine and Russian Painting, Kostas Papaioannou names Theophanes the Greek: “the El Greco of Russia.” See: Κώστας Παπαϊωάννου, Βυζαντινή και Ρωσική Ζωγραφική. Μετάφραση: Ελένη Νάκου (Εναλλα- κτικές Εκδόσεις, 2007), 211.
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