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Art under the Venetians
It is not for me to enter the lists and fight on behalf of some label to
pin on El Greco – ‘the last of the Byzantine painters’, ‘the first of the
Spanish Baroque’, etc. Art historians can thrash out this sort of thing;
and the reader will find the Byzantine case put with enthusiasm in
The Birth of Western Painting by Robert Byron and D. Talbot Rice
(long out of print, alas). This much, however, may be worth saying.
Arguments that depend on individual stylistic traits are pretty easy to
demolish. The famous elongation, for example, is not a feature of Greco
and of Byzantine art only. But since Greco definitely rejected the
Byzantine tradition in its major externals, we shall not find evidence
except in traits like this. So we must be very careful to know what we
mean when we say Greco was in some way Byzantine. We may mean
just that we get the same sort of thrill from a painting of Greco as we
get from a Byzantine work. Or we may mean that Greco would have
been a quite different sort of painter – and not just in the trivial, tautological
sense – if he had not been born in Crete, in the Byzantine
tradition. And with this unprovable, indeed counter-factual proposi-
tion, I rest content.
Postscript for travelers.* On the bluff north coast of Crete, very near the
north-eastern tip of the island, stands the monastery of Toplou, which
contains the last treasure of Cretan art. Toplou is only a few miles
from Sitea, twenty minutes’ walk from the bus route. I visited it during
the great Lenten fast, and thus tasted several foods which otherwise I
might have missed. The snails were especially good, and the Abbot
especially proficient at eating them. There was a pleasing irony about
the first meal I had there. Oil was prohibited. The monks therefore ate
enormous potatoes baked in their jackets, while I was given cold boiled
potatoes swimming in deep oil.
There is an untrue (I hope) story about a party of Frenchmen at
Sitea, who ate the local snails, expressed their pleasure and mentioned
that another delicacy in their home country was frogs’ legs. The next
night their plates were heaped high with the legs of frogs which had
been fished out of the local river and marshland. The Frenchmen ate
unflinchingly to the last bite, and died during the course of the night.
* And a footnote for travellers. It is impossible to show the exact location of all the
best Byzantine churches in a small map such as that on p, 7, There is an adequate
map of western Crete published by the Tourist Office at Canca, and sold in any
stationers. The best churches are marked on it. For information about central and
eastern Crete, I should recommend a visit to the office of the National Tourist Organization,
where there are maps. But really good maps are difficult to come by in Crete.
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