Caressing of the Virgin: A 16th-Century Icon from Kastoria

Joachim and Anna bend towards a child no larger than a doll, and the child, seated in her mother's arm, reaches back towards them. The subject is the Kolakeia of the Theotokos, rendered in English as the Caressing of the Virgin and known in Greek also as the Philostorgia ton Theopatoron, the tender affection of the Ancestors of God. This portable icon of the Caressing of the Virgin was painted in the middle of the sixteenth century on a single piece of wood measuring 121 × 52.5 × 3 cm, and it comes from the church of Saint Nicholas tou Kyritzi in Kastoria, in Western Macedonia.

Kolakeia (Caressing) of the Theotokos, mid-16th century, portable icon from the church of Saint Nicholas tou Kyritzi, Kastoria, 121 × 52.5 cm.

Panel paintings of the theme are not common. Its usual place in Byzantine art is the narrative cycle of the Virgin's early life, where it forms one scene among many; here it has been lifted out of any sequence and given a tall panel of its own, more than twice as high as it is wide, so that both parents can stand at full length. The painted scene remains largely intact, although cracks cross the surface and losses affect the borders as well as the gold ground. A plain frame, with a red band along its upper horizontal edge, encloses the painted field.

Joachim and Anna in the Caressing of the Virgin

Anna takes the left side of the composition. She stands upright, turned three-quarters towards the centre, her head inclined towards her daughter, and from the crown of the head almost to the knees her figure is a single column of red. The red maphorion carries a narrow gold border; beneath it a dark green kalyptra shows as a band across the brow. The long chiton, described as blue-green, now registers as a deep, nearly black tone where it falls below the mantle, and at the lower edge only flashes of red mark her feet.

From the right Joachim leans in with a strong turn of the body, knees flexed and one sandalled foot advanced, and the long diagonal folds of his himation follow that movement down to the hem. Under the pale rose himation he wears a full-length dark green tunic, with a gold-patterned band across the upper sleeve of his left arm. His head, heavy with dark curls and a full beard, is lowered towards the child.

Between them, held at the height of their chests, sits Mary. She rests easily in the crook of her mother's arm, Anna's hand passing beneath her, while her lower body, wrapped in a dark green chiton, stretches across towards Joachim, whose hands reach her feet over a gathered fold of his himation. With her right arm the child reaches out towards her mother. A deep red maphorion covers her head and shoulders and flares at its edges; her face is nearly frontal, and her halo, far smaller than those of her parents, is set between and slightly below theirs. All three haloes are gold.

The difference between the parents gives the composition its movement. Anna is a vertical and almost static mass, Joachim a diagonal, and the embrace that results is settled on one side and impulsive on the other. Where the two figures meet, in the narrow gap that is also the vertical axis of the panel, the painter has placed the child.

The Towered Building and the Red Cloth

Behind the figures rises a building painted in light grey. A high rectangular wall fills most of the background and ends on either side in a tower-like structure; both towers are shown in oblique perspective, each opened by a single arched window and covered by a lean-to tiled roof, and a lower stretch of wall joins them across the middle. Slung from one roof to the other, a red cloth sags in a broad curve beneath the title. Depth is admitted only at the edges, where the dark receding faces of the towers appear at far left and far right; everywhere else the wall lies flat behind the figures like a screen.

To break the monotony of the grey, the painter scattered circular ornaments and stylised palmettes across the façade, each disc dark at the centre, ringed in white and sprouting scrolling tendrils. One of them sits on the central axis directly above the child's halo, between the heads of Anna and Joachim. Above the architecture the ground is gold. Below, a strip of green ground, now darkened and mottled, carries the feet of the two parents.

Inscriptions on the Gold Ground

The title is written in red letters on the gold at the top centre of the panel, above the red cloth, and identifies the subject as “The Caressing of the Theotokos”. The scene's name appears in a non-standard spelling, while the Virgin's title is contracted to ΘΚΟΥ; the sigma of the article takes the lunate form. Smaller red inscriptions above the parents' haloes give the names of Anna and Joachim. Over the child is the abbreviation Μ(ΗΤΗ)Ρ Θ(ΕΟ)Υ, Mother of God, placed in the narrow space between the larger figures.

That last inscription, together with the title, names a small girl in her parents' arms by the role she has not yet assumed in the story. Neither text describes her as a child at all.

The Protevangelium of James behind the Image

Where does the episode come from? It does not appear in the canonical Gospel narratives. The iconography belongs to the cycle of the Theotokos and derives from the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, and more precisely from its Syriac and Armenian versions, not from the Greek text.

In monumental decoration the subject appears, for example, in the mosaic cycle of the Virgin's life in the inner narthex of the Chora in Constantinople, which is based on the Protevangelium. There the Virgin Caressed by her Parents occupies the eastern side of a vault in the second bay, facing the Virgin Blessed by the Priests on the western side, and throughout the cycle Mary is shown as a tiny adult in a blue robe. The painter of the Kastoria icon keeps the convention of the miniature adult but dresses her in a deep red maphorion over a dark green chiton, and changes the scale of the episode entirely: one compartment of a dense narrative sequence has become a single subject granted the full height of the wood.

Joachim and Anna recur later in the same story, guiding their daughter towards the high priest in the Presentation of the Virgin. In the Caressing the child is still carried, and the parents' attention is turned wholly on her.

Faces and Drapery in Close View

The heads of Anna and Joachim, with the child Mary between their haloes and the abbreviation ΜΡ ΘΥ above her.

At close range much of the icon's feeling turns out to depend on a few inclinations of line. Anna's face is long and narrow, the nose a thin vertical, the mouth small and red, the eyes large and heavy-lidded beneath arched brows; the flesh is laid in dark olive tones and lifted with ochre on the forehead, the cheekbone and the ridge of the nose. The red maphorion frames the face tightly, and under its edge the dark kalyptra crosses the brow.

Joachim's head is broader and darker, the hair falling in dense curls, the beard full, the face in three-quarter view and bent towards the centre, with light touched in by short strokes over brow and cheek. The drapery, too, is handled with some variety. Anna's mantle is modelled in deeper reds with few highlights; Joachim's himation is crossed by crisp white lines that break the cloth into angular planes; the child's deep red maphorion is shaped by dark folds and lighter crimson, its hem turned up and fluttering, and her small hand opens towards Anna. The gold band on Joachim's sleeve, drawn with a small repeated pattern, and the thin gold border of Anna's maphorion are among the few touches of ornament on the figures themselves.

Kastoria and Its Painters in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

The panel's provenance places it in one of the leading centres of post-Byzantine painting in the Balkans. Kastoria preserves some seventy churches and a large body of portable icons, among them the early fifteenth-century Virgin Eleousa of Kastoria, and between about 1481 and 1510 it gave its name to the School of Kastoria, a group of anonymous painters whose work reached well beyond the city. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the city, a metropolitan see from around 1532, was also drawing painters from elsewhere. Frangos Katelanos of Thebes painted the church of the Panagia Rasiotissa in 1553 and produced portable icons; Onouphrios of Argos, archpriest of Neokastro (Elbasan), worked in the Holy Apostles in 1547 and in the Anargyroi of the Gymnasium around the middle of the century, and painted icons as well. Wealthy merchants, meanwhile, brought icons of the Cretan School into the city.

None of these names can be attached to the Caressing of the Virgin. No signature survives on the panel and no attribution is recorded for it, so its painter remains unknown. What it retains is its link with the church of Saint Nicholas tou Kyritzi, dedicated to a saint whose cult spread widely in Kastoria because of the importance of the lake in the life of the city.