E.N. Tsigaridas and K. Loverdou-Tsigarida, Holy Great Monastery of Vatopaidi. Byzantine Icons and Revetments. Mount Athos: Monastery of Vatopaidi, 2007

The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

Holy Great Monastery of Vatopaidi. Byzantine Icons and Revetments. By E.N. Tsigaridas and K. Loverdou-Tsigarida. Mount Athos: Monastery of Vatopaidi, 2007. 447 pages. 90 euros hardback. ISBN 960-7735-38-8.

The study of Byzantine icons has been revolutionized in recent decades and this owes much to the progressive study and publication of the icons of the monastery of St Catherine at Sinai. That collection in Egypt has been of major importance for its information on the nature and development of the icon from the sixth to the thirteenth century. The value of this new and substantial publication of the icons of Vatopedi is that it offers equivalent new information on the history of the Byzantine icon from the thirteenth century onwards, and in particular on the fourteenth century. It is a highly important discussion of understudied materials.

This review is of the English edition. The plates are of high quality and are well chosen. The translation has a few oddities but the meaning is clear enough. The first part of the text is an art-historical catalogue which describes the icons, characterizes their style and iconography, and comes in each case to a conclusion about their date and the possible location where the artist worked (generally, but not exclusively, a choice is made between Athos, Constantinople, or Thessaloniki). It covers the portable icons of Vatopedi and is written by Professor Efthmios Tsigaridas. The second part of the text covers the Byzantine icon revetments of Vatopedi which survive (it is pointed out that according to records in unpublished archival documents some precious revetments were melted down to pay Ottoman taxes). This section is by Dr Katia Loverdou-Tsigarida.

The text is diffuse, with some of the essential information dispersed into the footnotes, but it is well worth delving into the discussions. A clear picture emerges, for example, of icon painting towards the end of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century, a period of production which has until now been insufficiently clear to understand. The materials help to set out the character of the sources of the flourishing production of Cretan and Russian artists in the fifteenth century. The dating of the icons depends on stylistic comparisons with other surviving paintings, and these are generally convincing. More controversial are the attributions to artists (like Kalliergis, who signed frescos at Verroia in 1315) or to places (Thessaloniki, for example, rather than Constantinople). But this comment is to admit that at present there is considerable debate over whether Constantinople had remained a productive centre of icon painting after the middle of the fourteenth century or whether artists had moved elsewhere to find patronage.

In all, it is noted that there are 3000 icons in the monastery dating from the twelfth to the twentieth century, and some seventy icons are here analysed in detail. A convincing job is done of identifying some twelfth-century templon beams. These pieces, and some fourteenth-century Deisis icons, allow the reconstruction of both twelfth- and fourteenth-century sanctuary screens in the Katholikon and in other chapels of the monastery. This is an important contribution to the study of the early development of the iconostasis.

Vatopedi has a pair of exquisite Royal Doors with the Annunciation (no. 51: 128 × 65 cm). Tsigaridas records that these were cut down and at some date fitted into the iconostasis of the chapel of the Nativity of the Virgin in the library tower. He concludes that they were made by an early fifteenth-century workshop in Constantinople and shows the nature of Byzantine influences on the Russian artist Andrei Rublev. In a study of the same doors (‘Byzantine Palaiologan Icons in Medieval Russia’, in Sarah T. Brooks (ed.), Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557). Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), pp. 180–99, esp. 185–8), Yuri Pyatnisky refers to the earlier publication by Tsigaridas in the Vatopedi publication of 1998 and makes a very different attribution. He argues that, since the panel was of chestnut wood, it was made on Athos and reflects the palette of Rublev himself. He does not commit himself to whether the artist was Byzantine or Russian, but emphasizes how many features the style shares with that of Rublev. These doors will no doubt become the centre-piece of further studies about the origins of the style of Rublev.

The section on metal revetments likewise contains much valuable information of great importance for the study of precious metal revetments, and aims to set out criteria for dating these. Thessaloniki is argued to be an important centre of production. In all, a major new publication.

ROBIN CORMACK

Courtauld Institute of Art