Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Learning, literature, science, and art

Page 21

Many monuments of the renaissance of Byzantine art under the Palaeologi survive. Among the buildings, the churches are most notable, in particular seven in Peloponnesian Mistra, several on Mount Athos, many in Macedonia, which in the fourteenth century was under the power of Serbia, and a number in Serbia itself. The brilliant flowering of mosaic work and fresco painting under the Palaeologi resulted in a remarkable legacy: the mosaics of Qahriye-jami in Constantinople, already referred to, and many frescoes of Mistra, Macedonia, and Serbia. On Mount Athos are mosaics and frescoes of the late thirteenth, the fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, but the full flower of Athonian art belongs to the sixteenth century. The famous Byzantine painter Manuel Panselinos of Thessalonica (Salonika), the Raphael or Giotto of Byzantine painting, probably lived in the first half of the sixteenth century; some of his work is perhaps still to be seen on Mount Athos, but on this point some uncertainty exists.

Many icons and illuminated manuscripts dating from the epoch of the Palaeoiogi have also been preserved. An example is a famous manuscript of Madrid of the fourteenth century containing the chronicle of John Scylitzes with about 600 interesting miniatures reflecting the history of Byzantium from 811 to the middle of the eleventh century the period Scylitzes covered. Two Parisian manuscripts, one belonging to the fourteenth century with a miniature of John Cantacuzene presiding at the Hesychast council, and the other to the beginning of the fifteenth century with a miniature of Manuel II, have already been mentioned.

The art of the Palaeologian epoch and its reflections in the Slavonic countries in general and Russia in particular have not yet been thoroughly studied; the evidence on this period has not yet been completely collected or studied, and in some cases not even discovered. Discussing the study of icon painting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries N. P. Kondakov wrote in 1909; To speak generally, we enter a dark forest in which the paths are unexplored. A more recent scholar of Byzantine painting of the fourteenth century, D. V. Ainalov, added: In this forest, however, some pioneers have already beaten paths in various directions and made some important positive observations. In 1919 G. Millet, in his book on the medieval Serbian churches, endeavored to refute the common opinion that Serbian art was nothing but a branch of Byzantine art and to prove that Serbian art had an original character of its own.

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