pictavium

Virgin Eleousa, early fifteenth century, portable icon from the Church of St Demetrios in the Oikonomou parish, now in the Byzantine Museum of Kastoria. The Virgin Eleousa of Kastoria, an early fifteenth-century portable icon now in the Byzantine Museum of Kastoria, presents the Theotokos holding the Christ Child in an unusually intimate and physically animated variation of the Glykophilousa type. Measuring 101 × 64 × 3 cm, the panel comes from the Church of St Demetrios in the Oikonomou parish of Kastoria. The identifying inscription names the Virgin as Eleousa, while the disposition of the Child, reclining almost horizontally across his mother's arms, connects the image more specifically with the iconographic variation usually known as the Pelagonitissa. The composition depends upon bodily contact. Mary bends her large head towards Christ and presses her face against his; the Child turns upward, his left hand reaching to her chin while his right arm drops freely beside his bo...

Christ as the Angel of Great Counsel, Georgios Moschos, 1620, southern domical vault of the nave, katholikon of the Monastery of the Holy Forty Martyrs, Chrysafa, Laconia. The Christ as the Angel of Great Counsel wall painting occupies the southern domical vault of the nave in the katholikon of the Monastery of the Holy Forty Martyrs at Chrysafa, Laconia. Painted in 1620 by Georgios Moschos of Nafplio, it belongs to the extensive Post-Byzantine programme that covers the church and, within that programme, marks the opening of the Christological cycle. Despite the unusual angelic form, the identification is visually immediate: a youthful, beardless Christ faces the viewer frontally, wings opening behind His shoulders, while a large cross-inscribed nimbus encloses the head. The dedicatory inscription of the church names Georgios Moschos as the painter responsible for almost the whole ensemble and records the rebuilding and decoration of the katholikon in 1620. Near Chrysafa, about eigh...

Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda and the Woman with the Haemorrhage, Hodegetria of the Brontochion Monastery, Mystras, c. 1312–22. The paired wall paintings of the Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda and the Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage belong to the early fourteenth-century decoration of the katholikon of the Virgin Hodegetria, usually known as the Aphentiko, in the Brontochion Monastery at Mystras. The church, when Metropolitan Nikephoros Moschopoulos presented the monastery with a precious Gospel book in 1311/12, was already functioning; its foundation under the hegoumenos Pachomios belongs towards the end of the first decade of the fourteenth century. Its architecture, marble revetment and painted decoration have long been recognised as evidence of unusually close artistic connections between Mystras and Constantinople. The surviving paintings are generally dated to 1312–22 . Modern scholarship places the Bethesda composition on the east wall of the narthex a...

Arnold Böcklin, Campagna Landscape (Campagna-Landschaft), c. 1859, oil on canvas, 88 × 105 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Arnold Böcklin’s Campagna Landscape ( Campagna-Landschaft ) belongs to the decisive Italian phase in which the Swiss painter was learning to turn observed nature into something denser, stranger and ultimately more enduring than topographical description. The oil on canvas, measuring 88 × 105 cm and preserved in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, is generally associated with the end of the 1850s. Older cataloguing gives a date of 1857–58; the museum’s current collection record dates it around 1859 , after Böcklin had left Rome and was working in Munich. In Campagna Landscape , what appears at first to be a secluded corner of the Roman Campagna gradually becomes more difficult to place. Trees gather into an enormous dark mass, the foreground is rough and dry, an opening at the right suddenly exposes a sunlit distance beneath an intensely blue sky. Human presen...

Enthroned Virgin and Child, old katholikon of the Great Meteoron Monastery, Meteora, from the wall-painting programme dated to 1483 and associated with the Kastoria Workshop. The Enthroned Virgin and Child at Great Meteoron belongs to one of the most important surviving ensembles of early Post-Byzantine monumental painting in Greece. The wall painting is associated with the old katholikon of the Monastery of the Transfiguration at Great Meteoron, the structure that now forms the sanctuary of the enlarged sixteenth-century church. Its date is 1483 , established by the painted dedicatory inscription recording the completion of the decoration on 21 November of that year. Modern scholarship connects this cycle with the so-called Kastoria Workshop , whose painters carried late Palaiologan traditions into the decades after the fall of Constantinople. This dating also changes an attribution sometimes proposed for the image. The painting cannot, in its original phase, be a work by Theophane...

Sanctuary doors with the Annunciation, Prophets Isaiah and David, and Saints Nicholas and Andrew, 15th century, tempera on wood, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, BXM 02022. The Annunciation Sanctuary Doors now preserved in the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens (BXM 02022) are a pair of fifteenth-century painted wooden leaves from Messina, Sicily. Approximately 142 × 79 cm and executed in tempera on wood, they place the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38) across the principal field, with the Prophets Isaiah and David above it and the smaller figures of Saints Nicholas and Andrew at the crown. The museum records their Messina provenance, while the dedicatory inscription identifies Andrea Limogallo as the man who commissioned them for the iconostasis of a church belonging to the city's Greek Orthodox milieu. Their present appearance carries a second history as well. For centuries the fifteenth-century painting lay beneath a later painted surface. Only during conservation in t...

Christ Zoodotes (The Life-Giver), attributed to Frangos Katelanos, ca. 1542–1551. National Museum of Medieval Art, Korçë, Albania (Inv. no. IN 5094). The Christ Zoodotes icon in the National Museum of Medieval Art at Korçë is a large post-Byzantine panel attributed to Frangos Katelanos and dated between 1542 and 1551. Measuring 106.5 × 69 × 4.7 cm (inv. no. IN 5094), it presents Christ frontally from slightly below the waist, blessing with his right hand while supporting an open Gospel book in his left. Its original provenance is unknown. The scale, elaborate gilding and unusually careful finish have led to the plausible suggestion that the panel once occupied a prominent position on the templon of an unidentified church. The icon was published in the 2006 exhibition catalogue Icons from the Orthodox Communities of Albania: Collection of the National Museum of Medieval Art, Korçë , prepared under the scientific editorship of Anastasia Tourta, with the catalogue texts by Eugenia Dra...

Portrait of the supplicant hieromonk Gennadios, early nineteenth century, dedicated to Arsani Monastery near Rethymno. Benaki Museum, Athens, 34 × 22 cm, inv. no. ΓΕ 33696. The Portrait of Monk Gennadios , painted in Crete in the early nineteenth century and now preserved in the Benaki Museum in Athens, occupies an unusual territory between Orthodox devotional painting and individual portraiture. The small portable panel, measuring 34 × 22 cm (inv. no. ΓΕ 33696), represents the hieromonk Gennadios in prayer and was dedicated to the historic Arsani Monastery near Rethymno. His identity is carried directly onto the painted surface by the extensive Greek inscription surrounding him. Gennadios fills almost the entire height of the panel. He wears a black monastic habit and tall black head covering, while a dark blue garment appears beneath the cloak at the chest and sleeves. The background is a muted olive green, without landscape, architecture or decorative setting. Against this restra...

  On folio 1v, the Horologion of 1423 opens with an architecture charged throughout with symbolic meaning. The parchment manuscript, produced at the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery under the authority of its founder and hegumen, Saint Cyril of Beloozero, is now preserved in Moscow at the Russian State Library, f. 304/I, no. 16. Executed principally in cinnabar, yellow and brown, the drawing bears the title “Cathedral Church of the Holy Apostles.” The miniature contains no human figures. Its subject emerges through the many-domed church, the prepared throne, the instruments of the Passion (John 19:29, 34) and the twice-repeated victorious formula IC XC NIKA. Exterior elevation, sanctuary interior, eschatological emblem: all have been compressed into a single field. The image belongs to symbolic illumination, presenting the Church as a sacred structure centred upon the Cross and awaiting the return of Christ (Matthew 24:30). The Horologion of 1423 as a Monastic Liturgical Book The Horo...