free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Art under the Venetians
topouli, was a tiny minority. But as time passed the archontopouli and
archontes multiplied. At the same time the Venetian nobility became
gradually Hellenized, and there was intermarriage between the two
races. Thus there emerged a class of Orthodox nobles, with property:
houses in one of the three cities, fiefs in the country. These were the
patrons and pillars of the Church.
They built their own little churches. They patronized the painters,
sometimes from abroad, who made them beautiful. We can sec their
names recorded in the founders’ inscriptions of chapels all over Crete.
Especially in the last fifty years of occupation, when plague and revolts
and Turkish attacks had exhausted the Venetians, and they were at
least sometimes conciliatory, the builders were active. Arkadi, the jewel
of Cretan monasteries, was built in 1587; Gonia in 1618. By about
1600 the two faiths were co-existing happily. Symbol of co-existence is
the church built at Spinalonga by Luca Michiel, Proveditor from 1572
to 1574; it was divided into two parts, one for the Greek, and the other
for the Latin rites.
Gerola in his great work listed more than eight hundred frescoed
churches in Crete. Most of these are fourteenth- or fifteenth-century.
The area of Crete is about 8,300 square kilometres. Thus for every ten
square kilometres there is a painted church. When one considers the
extent of barren mountains – though even here there are some chapels
– this abundance of churches is the more striking. It is only in the last
few years that we have been in a position to guess what the churches
looked like in these centuries. For, if interest in Byzantine art is a fairly
new phenomenon, the sub-class of Cretan art was more or less invented
by Gerola, Previous scholars, such as Pashley, went over Crete with a
fine toothcomb finding evidence of classical and even Venetian antiqueties,
but not a single wall-painting; the reasons being first that they did
not recognize the existence of Byzantine art and therefore ignored what
traces there were, and second that many of the frescoes had disappeared.
Just as Minoan art had to be excavated from beneath layers
of earth, so Byzantine paintings had to be uncovered from behind
layers of plaster. The best examples of Cretan art have been cleaned
and restored since the war, and thanks to scholars like Hadzidakis and
Kalokyris they are now being published and discussed.
How to approach these eight hundred churches? ‘The liveliness of
the faces, the expressive movements of the bodies, the translucent
colours make this a remarkable example of Paleclogue expressionismus.’
This sort of thing is intolerable except as the footnote to a comprehendsive
set of reproductions where the parallels and the colours can be
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