Presentation of the Virgin Icon from Korçë, Attributed to David Selenica

Bending over the dark green stairway, the aged high priest Zacharias lowers his hand until his fingertips rest on the halo of a small girl in a red maphorion, while her parents, Anna and Joachim, guide her towards him. The subject is the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, known in Orthodox usage as the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, or the Eisodia, and this Presentation of the Virgin icon sets it inside a temple of remarkable architectural fantasy. The panel came from the Church of St Nicholas in Korçë, in south-eastern Albania, and is now in Tirana, in the collection published as that of the Museum of Art and Architecture. It is published as an eighteenth-century work of David Selenica, also written Selenicasi and known in Greek-based scholarship as David of Selenitza.

The Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, panel icon from the Church of St Nicholas, Korçë, published as the work of David Selenica; now in Tirana.

The field is crowded. A Gothic vault hung with a chandelier, an altar burning behind drawn curtains, a press of candle-bearing girls in contemporary dress, two lions at the foot of the steps and, high on the left, the Virgin once again, now inside the Holy of Holies and visited by an angel: all of this shares a single panel. Near the lower edge, painted in a small cursive hand, runs a line of writing that appears to name a different painter altogether.

A Temple Built from Western Forms

The composition climbs from the lower right to the upper left. Joachim’s sandalled feet stand on a red pavement near the bottom of the panel; the child is placed beside a broad stair, painted a deep bottle green, its risers edged with gold ornament, which rises leftwards to the platform where Zacharias stands; behind and above him, lifted on its own faceted pink base, a domed tabernacle on slender columns with gilded capitals encloses the Virgin’s second appearance. Everything on the right side, including the parents, the maidens and the heavy crimson curtain looped across the upper corner, leans or points to the left, and the eye follows that slope upward to the tabernacle.

The architecture draws largely on a Western vocabulary. At the centre, a vaulted chamber, framed by clustered colonnettes and pointed arches, opens towards the viewer, its ribs converging around a ring-shaped oculus from which a chain lowers a corona of lamps and, beneath it, a single hanging lamp. Red curtains, drawn back to either side, reveal an inner sanctuary where a cylindrical altar on a stepped base carries a burning offering; a dark plume rises from it into the folds of the curtain, and small figures can be made out beside the altar on the right. Beyond the vault the temple turns into a white façade with a balustraded balcony, an oval window and a tall window filled with tracery roundels over leaded lancets. At the upper left, grey masonry with a column, a moulded capital and another oval opening closes the scene. Little structural logic binds these parts together, and the result resembles a stage set more closely than a building.

In the lower left corner two maned lions, painted in golden ochre, lie beside the stair: one couchant in the foreground with its forepaws stretched out, the second behind it on a higher step, both heads raised. They flank the approach to the priest and to the sanctuary above him.

The gilded border has suffered most. Along the left edge and at the lower corners the gold has worn through to a red layer beneath, and there are smaller losses along the top. A dark patch of damage interrupts the red floor below Anna’s feet, and a fine crack runs diagonally through the white architecture at the right. The figures remain largely legible, down to the highlights on their drapery.

Zacharias, Anna and Joachim Receive the Child

Zacharias touches the child’s halo as Anna and Joachim present her in the temple; detail of the icon attributed to David Selenica.

Seen at closer range, the central group shows how much care went into the figures. Zacharias wears a small red head-covering, and his grey hair falls over his shoulder in long curling locks that merge with a beard drawn in fine streaks of grey and white. His face is long and lean, with a strong nose and heavy-lidded eyes turned down towards the child. Over a black-green robe and a pink undergarment he wears a red and orange-gold mantle, gathered at the waist. One hand is spread against his girdle; the other arm, in a dark sleeve with an orange cuff, reaches forward so that only the fingertips touch the rim of the girl’s halo.

The child, haloed in gold, wears a red maphorion over a dark tunic and a long red skirt. Her small, rounded face is turned towards the priest, and both hands extend towards him from beneath her mantle. Anna, close behind, bends forward in a red maphorion over a grey-violet dress, a white kerchief framing her face; her arm, in its grey sleeve, reaches down until her hand rests on the girl’s shoulder. Joachim, dark-haired and dark-bearded, in an orange himation over a black tunic, stretches both hands forward, one raised towards Anna’s arm, the other lower and open.

The flesh tones pass from dark olive-brown shadows into warmer, lighter areas across foreheads, cheekbones and noses, with soft transitions between them. The eye sockets remain deeply shadowed, and the older faces acquire a tired gravity, Anna’s above all, with lines of age drawn beside the mouth and beneath the eyes. Drapery is handled more broadly. Joachim’s himation is described in large planes of orange, with pale, glossy lights pulled along the ridges of the folds, so that the cloth reads as heavy and faintly lustrous.

The Grisaille Mask on the Temple Wall

On the grey wall between Zacharias and Anna, level with their heads, the painter has placed a small mask in grisaille, its pale, impassive face framed by a scalloped headdress and shadowed below. A second mask of the same kind crowns the arched doorway in the white façade at the upper right. Neither has any narrative role. They belong to the same ornamental repertoire as the ribbed vault and the tracery, and, as the question of attribution will show, a comparable mask has been noted in another icon associated with David’s milieu.

The Angel, the Maidens and the Narrative of the Eisodia

The feast has no basis in the canonical Gospels. Its narrative derives from the apocryphal tradition, above all the Protoevangelium of James, in which the priest takes the child, kisses and blesses her, and Mary then lives in the Temple, receiving food from an angel. In the same tradition she was given to the Temple at the age of three, and Byzantine art could show her a second time within the same composition, seated in the Holy of Holies and fed by an angel. A seventeenth-century engraving discussed in a Dumbarton Oaks exhibit on the Protoevangelium of James places that visit in the upper left, as here.

In the icon from Korçë the second episode occupies the pink tabernacle. The Virgin stands, haloed, in a red maphorion over a dark robe, and extends both arms. An angel in pink and orange drapery swoops towards her from the right, wings spread, a long stem in one raised hand. Two moments of the story thus share one architectural space, their episodes separated by height.

The maidens, who crowd in from the edge and whose long white candles carry lit flames, occupy the right third of the panel. None of them is haloed. The painter has dressed them in the fashions of his own day: fitted bodices, full sleeves, lace at the neck and wrist, jewels at the breast, curled hair left uncovered. Their faces are smoother and rounder than those of the saints. The foremost, in a black bodice with an orange sleeve, stretches out her arm and points with her index finger across the scene towards the inner sanctuary, the one gesture in the panel that addresses the building itself.

Inscriptions: A Damaged Title and a Cursive Signature

Two pieces of writing survive. Along the upper border, in red majuscules on the gold, ran the title of the feast; only the opening letters ΤΑ and the closing letters ΩΝ remain visible, on either side of a dark element fixed over the centre of the frame, and what stood between them cannot be recovered from the visible inscription.

The second inscription matters more.

Near the lower edge, below the stair, a line of small black cursive minuscule gives what appears to be a painter’s name: ποίημα Θεοδώρου Πουλάκη, “work of Theodoros Poulakis”. The genitive ending of the forename seems to be written as a compact ligature, and the accents are not clearly distinguishable. To the right, along the bottom edge, traces of a further line survive, too fragmentary to transcribe.

David Selenica or Theodoros Poulakis? The Attribution of the Presentation of the Virgin Icon

David of Selenitza and Painting in the Korçë Region

The published attribution places the icon within the work of the most prominent artistic personality of early eighteenth-century painting in southern Albania. In his survey of religious painting in Albania, which introduces the 2006 Thessaloniki catalogue of the Korçë collection, the volume that also published the Christ Zoodotes icon attributed to Frangos Katelanos, Panayotis Vocotopoulos describes David as a hieromonk from Selenitza near Vlorë, who decorated the narthex of the chapel of the Virgin Koukouzelissa at the Great Lavra in 1715 and the large basilica of St Nicholas at Voskopojë in 1726, and to whom the wall paintings of the Megali Panagia in Thessaloniki (1727) and the exonarthex of Docheiariou are attributed. The church of St Nicholas named as this icon’s provenance is recorded as being in Korçë itself; David’s documented work for a church of the same dedication was at Voskopojë.

Vocotopoulos associates him with an early eighteenth-century learned movement that sought a return to the art of Panselinos, the painter of the Protaton, and whose theorist was Dionysios of Fourna, and he singles David out as the leading representative of the attempt to revive Palaiologan style. The features he lists as characteristic, including a successful rendering of volume, broad and soft modelling, a bright palette, realistic contemporary clothing and lively movement, can each be recognised here: in Joachim’s broadly lit himation, in the saturated reds and oranges, in the maidens’ bodices and lace, in the pointing arm that sets the right half of the panel in motion. The same survey mentions an Incredulity of Thomas in the Korçë collection, set in this artistic climate, whose background building carries a grisaille mask. The two masks of the Presentation sit comfortably in that company.

A Signature Naming Theodoros Poulakis

Poulakis belongs to an earlier generation and a different geography. According to the entry in the painters’ archive of the Institute of Neohellenic Research, he was born in Chania around 1620. Having reached Venice by 1644, he stayed until 1657, then settled in Corfu, where he worked and taught; he was again in Venice between 1671 and 1675 and died in Corfu on 16 November 1692. The entry stresses his strongly individual iconography and his choice of well-known engravings after Flemish painters as models, and records that his icons were widely accepted by Orthodox clients in Venice, the Ionian islands and the Levant. It also warns that his output has been adulterated by a number of forged signatures, mainly in Athenian collections.

His name is not new to the Albanian material. Vocotopoulos reassigned a small two-zone icon in Tirana, with the Presentation of Mary and the Dormition above and three mounted saints below, from the school of Onouphrios to the art of Poulakis, dating it to the second half of the seventeenth century. That panel is a different object, and its case decides nothing about the present one; it does show how unstable the boundaries between these painters’ works have proved in the literature.

Read literally, the cursive line would move the icon out of the eighteenth century, since Poulakis died in 1692, and out of David’s oeuvre. Several explanations remain open. The signature may be authentic, in which case the published date and attribution would both need revision; it may be a later addition, of the kind the Poulakis literature has learnt to treat with suspicion; or the attribution to David may rest on stylistic grounds that gave the inscription little weight. The Western architecture, the theatrical curtains and the fashionable crowd of maidens are compatible with Poulakis’s documented reliance on printed models. The soft modelling, bright colour and contemporary costume correspond just as closely to Vocotopoulos’s account of David. On the painted surface alone the question stays unresolved, and an examination of how the inscription sits on and within the surrounding paint layers would be the decisive next step.

Sources

• Vocotopoulos, P. L., “Religious Painting in Albania from the 10th to the 19th Century”, in A. Tourta (ed.), Icons from the Orthodox Communities of Albania: Collection of the National Museum of Medieval Art, Korçë, Thessaloniki 2006.
• Pandektis, “Poulakis (Pulachi, Pulaki) Theodoros”, Greek Painters after the Fall of Constantinople (1450–1830), Institute of Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation.
• Dumbarton Oaks, “Presentation of the Virgin”, online exhibit.